Development of a design environment for integrated concurrent engineering (DE-ICE) in university education : integrating student designers, design tools, and active learning

Abstract

The development of an operational framework for a design center to enhance learning in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics is described. The results of research at MIT, which included a survey of students and faculty in the Department, is summarized. Visits to aerospace industry design centers are considered with respect to their implications toward engineering education. DE-ICE needs are explained and mapped to technical requirements through quality function deployment. Functional analysis with use case diagrams and a product matrix mapping requirements to implementations are used to generate architectural variants. These variants are synthesized into a suggested architecture for the design center. An enabling prototype for the DE-ICE system is characterized: an On-Line Teaching Assistant (OLTA) that provides guidance and project management to student designers. A part of the OLTA is the project navigator, which provides a roadmap through a design process by depicting the dependencies between documents associated with a project.