James Gopsill | University of Bristol (original) (raw)

Conference by James Gopsill

International Conference on Engineering Design, 2019

SAR provides an unobtrusive implementation of AR and enables multiple stakeholders to observe and... more SAR provides an unobtrusive implementation of AR and enables multiple stakeholders to observe and interact with an augmented physical model. This is synonymous with co-design activities and hence, there is a potential for SAR to have a significant impact in the way design teams may set-up and run their co-design activities in the future. Whilst there are a growing number of studies which apply SAR to design activities, few studies exist that examine a particular element of a design activity in a controlled manner. This paper will begin to fill this gap through the controlled study of SAR and its effects on the communication between participants of a co-design activity. To do so the paper compares a controlled design session, using more traditional methods of design representations (3D models on a screen), to sessions run using SAR. The sessions are then analysed to gather information on the gestures used by the participants as well as the overall efficiency of the participants at completing the set design task. The paper concludes that the data gathered tentatively supports a link between the use of SAR and improved communication between design session participants.

International Conference for Project Management: Case Study of Bath Formula Student Project, 2018

This paper contributes to a better understanding and design of dashboards for monitoring of engin... more This paper contributes to a better understanding and design of dashboards for monitoring of engineering projects based on the projects' digital footprint and user-cantered design approach. The paper presents an explicit insight based framework for the evaluation of dashboard visualisations and compares the performance of two groups of student engineering project managers against the framework: a group with the dashboard visualisations and a group without the dashboard. The results of our exploratory study demonstrate that student project managers who used the dashboard generated more useful information and exhibited more complex reasoning on the project progress, thus informing knowledge of the provision of information to engineers in support of their project understanding.

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, 2018

The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support busin... more The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support business and economic growth in developed countries. For example, the United Kingdom (UK) has invested £968 Million into the creation of Catapult centres to provide 'pull through' of low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) research and science. While these Catapults have been instrumental in developing new technologies, the uptake of new technology within industry remains a considerable challenge. One of the reasons for this is that of skills and competencies, and in particular, defining the new skills and competencies necessary to effectively apply and operate the new technology within the context of the business. Addressing this issue is non-trivial because the skills and competencies cannot be defined a priori and will evolve with the maturity of the technology. Therefore, there is a need to create methods that enable the elicitation and definition of skills and competen-cies that co-evolve with new technology development, and what are referred to herein as knowledge structures. To meet this challenge, this paper reports the results from a dynamic co-word network analysis of the technical documentation from New Technology Development (NTD) programmes at the National Composites Centre (NCC). Through this analysis, emerging knowledge structures can be identified and monitored, and be used to inform industry on the skills & competencies required for a technology .

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, 2018

Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variet... more Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variety making the effective development of detailed understanding of work underway difficult, which in turn impacts on management and assurance of performance. Leveraging the digital nature of modern engineering work, recent research has demonstrated the capability and opportunity for implementation of broad-spectrum data analytics for development of detailed management information. Of key benefit is that these analytics may be both real-time and automatic. This paper contextualises such analytics with respect to PDM through exploration of the potential for driving the analytics directly from data typically captured within PDM systems. Through review of twenty-five analytics generated from engineering-based digital assets, this paper examines the subset that may be applied to PDM-driven analysis on systems as-is, examines the coverage of such analytics from the perspective of the potential managerial information and understanding that could be inferred, and explores the potential for maximizing the set of analytics driven from PDM systems through capture of a minimal set of supplementary data. This paper presents the opportunity for integration of detailed analytics of engineering work into PDM systems and the extension of their capability to support project management and team performance.

The use of Mixed Reality (MR) tools can improve information retrieval, collaboration and decision... more The use of Mixed Reality (MR) tools can improve information retrieval, collaboration and decision making, thus aiding the management of buildings within the operation and maintenance (O&M) lifecycle stages. In this paper, we focus on the use of MR in visualising BIM data to aid building lifecycle management. This paper compares current and emerging MR tools and explores their potential in being applied to O&M of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). MR refers to technology that enhances reality by integrating it with the digital world, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and spherical panoramas, known as Photo-spheres. Current literature on applications and limitations of MR in the O&M cycle for small businesses is explored and the user requirements for implementation and use are elicited. Key requirements are found to be cost, skill level, interoperability, prerequisite data, interactivity and time. Using these requirements, the state-of-the-art in VR, AR and Photosphere environments is assessed and the contexts in which they are most appropriate are developed. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for the selection of an appropriate strategy dependent on the maturity of BIM adoption within an enterprise. A number of theoretical and conceptual implications are also developed.

NordDesign, 2018

The rapid proliferation of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies over the past 30 years has introdu... more The rapid proliferation of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies over the past 30 years has introduced new capabilities and opportunities to further support design activities. It is therefore not surprising that there is an increasing body of knowledge on the application of AR within design. However, little work has been performed on consolidating this knowledge to enable the identification of general trends and gaps in the successful application of AR across design activities. This is both critical to design research to ensure that the field provides comprehensive coverage of the potential of AR in design, and for industry who are looking to AR to enhance the productivity of their design processes. To meet this need, the paper presents a review of the design literature relating to AR and maps this research in relation to the type of AR technology and the stage in the design process. From this review, the paper identifies the AR technologies that show greatest promise in supporting design activity and areas in design that have had little to no research with regards to AR. Through this investigation it was possible to determine that while there are currently some AR technologies aimed at supporting design not all forms of AR technologies are currently being investigated with SAR and HHD having more commercially available platforms than HMDs. More importantly, this review found that not every stage of the design process is currently supported by AR technologies. It appears that the initial and final stages of the design process are the areas that lack the most support. Indeed the Task, Design Specification and Product Documentation stages (first, second and final stages in the design process respectively) are the areas where little to no research has been undertaken. These stages in the design process are thus identified as potential areas for further development of AR technologies to support the growth and acceptance of AR in design.

Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variet... more Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variety making the effective development of detailed understanding of work underway difficult, which in turn impacts on management and assurance of performance. Leveraging the digital nature of modern engineering work, recent research has demonstrated the capability and opportunity for implementation of broad-spectrum data analytics for development of detailed management information. Of key benefit is that these analytics may be both real-time and automatic. This paper contextualises such analytics with respect to PDM through exploration of the potential for driving the analytics directly from data typically captured within PDM systems. Through review of twenty-five analytics generated from engineering-based digital assets, this paper examines the subset that may be applied to PDM-driven analysis on systems as-is, examines the coverage of such analytics from the perspective of the potential managerial information and understanding that could be inferred, and explores the potential for maximizing the set of analytics driven from PDM systems through capture of a minimal set of supplementary data. This paper presents the opportunity for integration of detailed analytics of engineering work into PDM systems and the extension of their capability to support project management and team performance.

DESIGN 2018: International Design Conference, 2018

Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) systems aim to facilitate t... more Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) systems aim to facilitate the capture and dissemination of information throughout the product life-cycle by providing an artefact-centric approach to Information Management. Work is progressing in providing three dimensional artefact-based user interfaces to PLM/PDM and in contribution to this field, this paper describes the design and verification or a number of Visual Information Objects (VIO), visual markers that indicate the presence of information within the three dimensional artefact space.

The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support busin... more The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support business and economic growth in developed countries. For example, the United Kingdom (UK) has invested £968 Million into the creation of Catapult centres to provide 'pull through' of low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) research and science. While these Catapults have been instrumental in developing new technologies, the uptake of new technology within industry remains a considerable challenge. One of the reasons for this is that of skills and competencies, and in particular, defining the new skills and competencies necessary to effectively apply and operate the new technology within the context of the business. Addressing this issue is non-trivial because the skills and competencies cannot be defined a priori and will evolve with the maturity of the technology. Therefore, there is a need to create methods that enable the elicitation and definition of skills and competen-cies that co-evolve with new technology development, and what are referred to herein as knowledge structures. To meet this challenge, this paper reports the results from a dynamic co-word network analysis of the technical documentation from New Technology Development (NTD) programmes at the National Composites Centre (NCC). Through this analysis, emerging knowledge structures can be identified and monitored, and be used to inform industry on the skills & competencies required for a technology .

Prototyping is a fundamental activity across design with one of the most common types of tool use... more Prototyping is a fundamental activity across design with one of the most common types of tool used during prototyping sessions are construction kits. These kits have of a number of bricks that designers are able to construct designs from. Meeting the constraints within a kit ensures a valid solution. With the advent of high-performance computing, this paper computes the solution space that is represented by construction kits and investigates the number of pathways to potential solutions and reveals that construction kits have an inherent bias to particular solutions.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Management and Processing, 2018

We provide a case study of understanding the environment and work context of a visualisation tool... more We provide a case study of understanding the environment and work context of a visualisation tool used in a collaborative engineering organisation, in order to inform the design, development and evaluation of a software network tool that uses a novel algorithm to search knowledge topics in a document corpus. We utilise focus group and qualitative interview data to understand the dynamics of existing knowledge searches and the visual analytics process of collaborative working environments in an engineering domain. We discuss the enablers and functionality needed in the network tool, and the envisaged challenges in its implementation. These challenges and enablers of a knowledge management visualisation software are then discussed in relation to evaluating the tool in a way that is grounded in the contextual working environment in which it will be used.

International Conference on Engineering Design, 2017

Performance of engineering design and development projects depends on myriad factors, creating ch... more Performance of engineering design and development projects depends on myriad factors, creating challenges in implementation and management. These are compounded by potential for high variation across contexts. This work investigates influencers upon performance and contextual variation through relationship between real industry issues and factors that influence project performance. Through survey, interview, and network analysis, issue-causing groups of features in each specific case are identified and compared. The results find a majority of issues arising from person-centric sources. They also identify both discrete groups of issues with narrow source and influence, and with broad ties across the project context; forms which may stem from conditions of the scenario. Finally, they show similarity in the influences on performance across contexts with a caveat that, while the influential area remains, the structure to be taken within may vary. General analysis clarifies performance in engineering and highlights those areas in which support-system development is of most use, and specific analysis gives areas in which industry managers should focus for best benefit to the project.

Design Structure Matrices have become a fundamental tool to support engineers in their handling a... more Design Structure Matrices have become a fundamental tool to support engineers in their handling and management of interactions across product & organisational architectures. Recent work in the field has exploited the opportunity afforded by Product Lifecycle Management systems, which capture the digital footprint of engineering projects to generate Design Structure Matrices in real-time through the co-occurrence of edits to product models. Given the systematic and more objective nature of the generation of these DSMs as well as being able to monitor their evolution throughout engineering projects, there now lies an opportunity in comparing projects/products using DSMs. To investigate this and the potential insights that could be generated, this paper presents the automatic generation of DSMs for two Formula Student projects. These have then been compared with respect to the end-of-project, change propagation characteristics and evolution of the DSMs. From this analysis, six insights have been generated that map the characteristics of the DSMs to the performance of the project/product and highlights the potential of automatic DSMs to further support engineering project management.

International Conference on Engineering Design, 2017

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the democratisation of design can be achieved for use... more The purpose of this paper is to explore how the democratisation of design can be achieved for useful items manufactured by Filament Deposition Modelling (FDM). This is achieved through a design study that involves the identification of typical functional objects manufactured by FDM and then performing and mapping the design process for these items. Through analysis of the respective difficulties contributed by different categories of actions, four areas of the design process are identified as requiring improvement in order to democratise design. The study also finds that it is easier to amend models than it is to generate them from scratch. This leads to the consideration of democratising design through amending existing models in design repositories, such as Thingiverse. The discussion examines the consequences of these findings and how they impact the requirements and possible functionality of a system that could meet the challenge of democratising FDM design.

Recipient of conference Best Paper Award. Large-scale engineering projects are challenging to mo... more Recipient of conference Best Paper Award.

Large-scale engineering projects are challenging to monitor, manage, and improve. This paper presents an approach to addressing part of this challenge - the automatic detection of engineering activity through the project lifecycle. By monitoring the focus of work in real-time, this aims to enable managers to build a detailed understanding of the activity that occurs at different stages, work that deviates from that expected, and issues as they arise. The approach is applied to a long-term email dataset, and extracts key themes, issue occurrence, and activity focus through time.

Computer Aided Design (CAD) has become an integral tool for many engineering design activities. C... more Computer Aided Design (CAD) has become an integral tool for many engineering design activities. CAD not only forms the digital embodiment of the products design but also supports communication between engineers as a intermediary object, the analysis of engineering systems, and enables computer-mediated collaborative work on the product. It is argued that the logs of the engineers' user interactions could be a powerful sensor in providing insights into the engineers and engineering design process. This paper presents results from the analysis of CAD logs generated by 45 engineering students.

The use of Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is increasing rapidly in both the commercial and indu... more The use of Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is increasing rapidly in both the commercial and industrial sectors as a means of rapidly prototyping geometrically complex parts. Particular affordances of FDM include the reduction of waste material during manufacture, the use of multiple materials within a single manufacturing process and the ability to manipulate the internal geometry of a part. The latter of which has seen the generation of many 2-dimensional repeating pattern structures such as square, rectilinear and hexagonal, as well as an emerging field of 3-dimensional structures. Although these patterns have provided stiffness and rigidity whilst reducing the production time of FDM prototypes, many do not consider the actual loading conditions of the part in-situ, where it is argued that further significant gains in the performance could be achieved. This includes further reduction in process time and increased part functionality.

Thus, this paper presents initial work into the generation of an infill that is derived from the predicted stress profile for the part. This has been achieved through the post-processing of Finite Element (FE) models to identify the stress profile. Interpolation across these profiles leads to a set of aligned Bezier splines that enable the transmission of force and are also able to be manufactured using FDM. These splines are embedded within the typical slicing procedure of a part ahead of being manufactured on a FDM machine. Initial results from parts designed to support three-point bending loads show a 79% increase in the stiffness of the part alongside a consistent and repeatable mode of failure when compared to the commonly used honeycomb infill design.

Social Media & Society International Conference, 2016

Social media penetration has compelled higher education and organisations to consider the role of... more Social media penetration has compelled higher education and organisations to consider the role of social media in various novel pedagogical learning settings . We explored social media communication and perceptions of undergraduate engineers involved in an industrially focused annual worldwide competition to design and develop a racing car, where students are allocated project management and team leadership responsibilities (

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM15), Oct 2015

The development of Computer Aided Design (CAD) models is a fundamental and distinct feature of En... more The development of Computer Aided Design (CAD) models is a fundamental and distinct feature of Engineering Projects. CAD models can be considered to be the digital embodiment of the products’ design and are used to support a wide variety of tasks that span the embodiment, detail, manufacture and commissioning phases of a project. With this in mind, it is proposed that the monitoring and modelling of the edit trace behaviour of CAD files may provide additional understanding and evidence that supplements current approaches to monitor and manage engineering projects.

To explore this proposition, this paper presents results from an exploratory study that seeks to model the edit trace behaviour of CAD files based upon their meta- data attributes (for example, file size, date modified & date accessed). The edit trace behaviour has been mapped to a sigmoid function in order to be able to describe and potentially predict future behaviour. The potential impact of being able to provide this type of information to engineering project management is also discussed.

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, 2015

Product service plays an essential role in day-today operations of nowadays manufacturing industr... more Product service plays an essential role in day-today operations of nowadays manufacturing industries. However, the changing demands of the market/customers, the increasing complexity of product functionalities and the extended product lifecycles present challenges to related In-Service projects. In order to handle the increasing number of projects and to control the costs and resource consumptions, it is critical to improve the efficiency and automation of process management. Within this context, this paper introduces some data-driven approaches to interpret and represent changes of project process over time in an automatic manner. These approaches aim to help project actors improve their understanding of process structure and the efficiency of process management, and also enable them to investigate process changes from more dynamic perspectives. To evaluate the approaches, a dataset from an aerospace organisation is considered in this paper.

International Conference on Engineering Design, 2019

SAR provides an unobtrusive implementation of AR and enables multiple stakeholders to observe and... more SAR provides an unobtrusive implementation of AR and enables multiple stakeholders to observe and interact with an augmented physical model. This is synonymous with co-design activities and hence, there is a potential for SAR to have a significant impact in the way design teams may set-up and run their co-design activities in the future. Whilst there are a growing number of studies which apply SAR to design activities, few studies exist that examine a particular element of a design activity in a controlled manner. This paper will begin to fill this gap through the controlled study of SAR and its effects on the communication between participants of a co-design activity. To do so the paper compares a controlled design session, using more traditional methods of design representations (3D models on a screen), to sessions run using SAR. The sessions are then analysed to gather information on the gestures used by the participants as well as the overall efficiency of the participants at completing the set design task. The paper concludes that the data gathered tentatively supports a link between the use of SAR and improved communication between design session participants.

International Conference for Project Management: Case Study of Bath Formula Student Project, 2018

This paper contributes to a better understanding and design of dashboards for monitoring of engin... more This paper contributes to a better understanding and design of dashboards for monitoring of engineering projects based on the projects' digital footprint and user-cantered design approach. The paper presents an explicit insight based framework for the evaluation of dashboard visualisations and compares the performance of two groups of student engineering project managers against the framework: a group with the dashboard visualisations and a group without the dashboard. The results of our exploratory study demonstrate that student project managers who used the dashboard generated more useful information and exhibited more complex reasoning on the project progress, thus informing knowledge of the provision of information to engineers in support of their project understanding.

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, 2018

The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support busin... more The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support business and economic growth in developed countries. For example, the United Kingdom (UK) has invested £968 Million into the creation of Catapult centres to provide 'pull through' of low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) research and science. While these Catapults have been instrumental in developing new technologies, the uptake of new technology within industry remains a considerable challenge. One of the reasons for this is that of skills and competencies, and in particular, defining the new skills and competencies necessary to effectively apply and operate the new technology within the context of the business. Addressing this issue is non-trivial because the skills and competencies cannot be defined a priori and will evolve with the maturity of the technology. Therefore, there is a need to create methods that enable the elicitation and definition of skills and competen-cies that co-evolve with new technology development, and what are referred to herein as knowledge structures. To meet this challenge, this paper reports the results from a dynamic co-word network analysis of the technical documentation from New Technology Development (NTD) programmes at the National Composites Centre (NCC). Through this analysis, emerging knowledge structures can be identified and monitored, and be used to inform industry on the skills & competencies required for a technology .

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, 2018

Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variet... more Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variety making the effective development of detailed understanding of work underway difficult, which in turn impacts on management and assurance of performance. Leveraging the digital nature of modern engineering work, recent research has demonstrated the capability and opportunity for implementation of broad-spectrum data analytics for development of detailed management information. Of key benefit is that these analytics may be both real-time and automatic. This paper contextualises such analytics with respect to PDM through exploration of the potential for driving the analytics directly from data typically captured within PDM systems. Through review of twenty-five analytics generated from engineering-based digital assets, this paper examines the subset that may be applied to PDM-driven analysis on systems as-is, examines the coverage of such analytics from the perspective of the potential managerial information and understanding that could be inferred, and explores the potential for maximizing the set of analytics driven from PDM systems through capture of a minimal set of supplementary data. This paper presents the opportunity for integration of detailed analytics of engineering work into PDM systems and the extension of their capability to support project management and team performance.

The use of Mixed Reality (MR) tools can improve information retrieval, collaboration and decision... more The use of Mixed Reality (MR) tools can improve information retrieval, collaboration and decision making, thus aiding the management of buildings within the operation and maintenance (O&M) lifecycle stages. In this paper, we focus on the use of MR in visualising BIM data to aid building lifecycle management. This paper compares current and emerging MR tools and explores their potential in being applied to O&M of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). MR refers to technology that enhances reality by integrating it with the digital world, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and spherical panoramas, known as Photo-spheres. Current literature on applications and limitations of MR in the O&M cycle for small businesses is explored and the user requirements for implementation and use are elicited. Key requirements are found to be cost, skill level, interoperability, prerequisite data, interactivity and time. Using these requirements, the state-of-the-art in VR, AR and Photosphere environments is assessed and the contexts in which they are most appropriate are developed. The paper concludes with a number of recommendations for the selection of an appropriate strategy dependent on the maturity of BIM adoption within an enterprise. A number of theoretical and conceptual implications are also developed.

NordDesign, 2018

The rapid proliferation of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies over the past 30 years has introdu... more The rapid proliferation of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies over the past 30 years has introduced new capabilities and opportunities to further support design activities. It is therefore not surprising that there is an increasing body of knowledge on the application of AR within design. However, little work has been performed on consolidating this knowledge to enable the identification of general trends and gaps in the successful application of AR across design activities. This is both critical to design research to ensure that the field provides comprehensive coverage of the potential of AR in design, and for industry who are looking to AR to enhance the productivity of their design processes. To meet this need, the paper presents a review of the design literature relating to AR and maps this research in relation to the type of AR technology and the stage in the design process. From this review, the paper identifies the AR technologies that show greatest promise in supporting design activity and areas in design that have had little to no research with regards to AR. Through this investigation it was possible to determine that while there are currently some AR technologies aimed at supporting design not all forms of AR technologies are currently being investigated with SAR and HHD having more commercially available platforms than HMDs. More importantly, this review found that not every stage of the design process is currently supported by AR technologies. It appears that the initial and final stages of the design process are the areas that lack the most support. Indeed the Task, Design Specification and Product Documentation stages (first, second and final stages in the design process respectively) are the areas where little to no research has been undertaken. These stages in the design process are thus identified as potential areas for further development of AR technologies to support the growth and acceptance of AR in design.

Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variet... more Modern engineering work, both project-based and operations, is replete with complexity and variety making the effective development of detailed understanding of work underway difficult, which in turn impacts on management and assurance of performance. Leveraging the digital nature of modern engineering work, recent research has demonstrated the capability and opportunity for implementation of broad-spectrum data analytics for development of detailed management information. Of key benefit is that these analytics may be both real-time and automatic. This paper contextualises such analytics with respect to PDM through exploration of the potential for driving the analytics directly from data typically captured within PDM systems. Through review of twenty-five analytics generated from engineering-based digital assets, this paper examines the subset that may be applied to PDM-driven analysis on systems as-is, examines the coverage of such analytics from the perspective of the potential managerial information and understanding that could be inferred, and explores the potential for maximizing the set of analytics driven from PDM systems through capture of a minimal set of supplementary data. This paper presents the opportunity for integration of detailed analytics of engineering work into PDM systems and the extension of their capability to support project management and team performance.

DESIGN 2018: International Design Conference, 2018

Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) systems aim to facilitate t... more Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) systems aim to facilitate the capture and dissemination of information throughout the product life-cycle by providing an artefact-centric approach to Information Management. Work is progressing in providing three dimensional artefact-based user interfaces to PLM/PDM and in contribution to this field, this paper describes the design and verification or a number of Visual Information Objects (VIO), visual markers that indicate the presence of information within the three dimensional artefact space.

The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support busin... more The development of new technology has been identified as one of the key enablers to support business and economic growth in developed countries. For example, the United Kingdom (UK) has invested £968 Million into the creation of Catapult centres to provide 'pull through' of low Technology Readiness Level (TRL) research and science. While these Catapults have been instrumental in developing new technologies, the uptake of new technology within industry remains a considerable challenge. One of the reasons for this is that of skills and competencies, and in particular, defining the new skills and competencies necessary to effectively apply and operate the new technology within the context of the business. Addressing this issue is non-trivial because the skills and competencies cannot be defined a priori and will evolve with the maturity of the technology. Therefore, there is a need to create methods that enable the elicitation and definition of skills and competen-cies that co-evolve with new technology development, and what are referred to herein as knowledge structures. To meet this challenge, this paper reports the results from a dynamic co-word network analysis of the technical documentation from New Technology Development (NTD) programmes at the National Composites Centre (NCC). Through this analysis, emerging knowledge structures can be identified and monitored, and be used to inform industry on the skills & competencies required for a technology .

Prototyping is a fundamental activity across design with one of the most common types of tool use... more Prototyping is a fundamental activity across design with one of the most common types of tool used during prototyping sessions are construction kits. These kits have of a number of bricks that designers are able to construct designs from. Meeting the constraints within a kit ensures a valid solution. With the advent of high-performance computing, this paper computes the solution space that is represented by construction kits and investigates the number of pathways to potential solutions and reveals that construction kits have an inherent bias to particular solutions.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Management and Processing, 2018

We provide a case study of understanding the environment and work context of a visualisation tool... more We provide a case study of understanding the environment and work context of a visualisation tool used in a collaborative engineering organisation, in order to inform the design, development and evaluation of a software network tool that uses a novel algorithm to search knowledge topics in a document corpus. We utilise focus group and qualitative interview data to understand the dynamics of existing knowledge searches and the visual analytics process of collaborative working environments in an engineering domain. We discuss the enablers and functionality needed in the network tool, and the envisaged challenges in its implementation. These challenges and enablers of a knowledge management visualisation software are then discussed in relation to evaluating the tool in a way that is grounded in the contextual working environment in which it will be used.

International Conference on Engineering Design, 2017

Performance of engineering design and development projects depends on myriad factors, creating ch... more Performance of engineering design and development projects depends on myriad factors, creating challenges in implementation and management. These are compounded by potential for high variation across contexts. This work investigates influencers upon performance and contextual variation through relationship between real industry issues and factors that influence project performance. Through survey, interview, and network analysis, issue-causing groups of features in each specific case are identified and compared. The results find a majority of issues arising from person-centric sources. They also identify both discrete groups of issues with narrow source and influence, and with broad ties across the project context; forms which may stem from conditions of the scenario. Finally, they show similarity in the influences on performance across contexts with a caveat that, while the influential area remains, the structure to be taken within may vary. General analysis clarifies performance in engineering and highlights those areas in which support-system development is of most use, and specific analysis gives areas in which industry managers should focus for best benefit to the project.

Design Structure Matrices have become a fundamental tool to support engineers in their handling a... more Design Structure Matrices have become a fundamental tool to support engineers in their handling and management of interactions across product & organisational architectures. Recent work in the field has exploited the opportunity afforded by Product Lifecycle Management systems, which capture the digital footprint of engineering projects to generate Design Structure Matrices in real-time through the co-occurrence of edits to product models. Given the systematic and more objective nature of the generation of these DSMs as well as being able to monitor their evolution throughout engineering projects, there now lies an opportunity in comparing projects/products using DSMs. To investigate this and the potential insights that could be generated, this paper presents the automatic generation of DSMs for two Formula Student projects. These have then been compared with respect to the end-of-project, change propagation characteristics and evolution of the DSMs. From this analysis, six insights have been generated that map the characteristics of the DSMs to the performance of the project/product and highlights the potential of automatic DSMs to further support engineering project management.

International Conference on Engineering Design, 2017

The purpose of this paper is to explore how the democratisation of design can be achieved for use... more The purpose of this paper is to explore how the democratisation of design can be achieved for useful items manufactured by Filament Deposition Modelling (FDM). This is achieved through a design study that involves the identification of typical functional objects manufactured by FDM and then performing and mapping the design process for these items. Through analysis of the respective difficulties contributed by different categories of actions, four areas of the design process are identified as requiring improvement in order to democratise design. The study also finds that it is easier to amend models than it is to generate them from scratch. This leads to the consideration of democratising design through amending existing models in design repositories, such as Thingiverse. The discussion examines the consequences of these findings and how they impact the requirements and possible functionality of a system that could meet the challenge of democratising FDM design.

Recipient of conference Best Paper Award. Large-scale engineering projects are challenging to mo... more Recipient of conference Best Paper Award.

Large-scale engineering projects are challenging to monitor, manage, and improve. This paper presents an approach to addressing part of this challenge - the automatic detection of engineering activity through the project lifecycle. By monitoring the focus of work in real-time, this aims to enable managers to build a detailed understanding of the activity that occurs at different stages, work that deviates from that expected, and issues as they arise. The approach is applied to a long-term email dataset, and extracts key themes, issue occurrence, and activity focus through time.

Computer Aided Design (CAD) has become an integral tool for many engineering design activities. C... more Computer Aided Design (CAD) has become an integral tool for many engineering design activities. CAD not only forms the digital embodiment of the products design but also supports communication between engineers as a intermediary object, the analysis of engineering systems, and enables computer-mediated collaborative work on the product. It is argued that the logs of the engineers' user interactions could be a powerful sensor in providing insights into the engineers and engineering design process. This paper presents results from the analysis of CAD logs generated by 45 engineering students.

The use of Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is increasing rapidly in both the commercial and indu... more The use of Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) is increasing rapidly in both the commercial and industrial sectors as a means of rapidly prototyping geometrically complex parts. Particular affordances of FDM include the reduction of waste material during manufacture, the use of multiple materials within a single manufacturing process and the ability to manipulate the internal geometry of a part. The latter of which has seen the generation of many 2-dimensional repeating pattern structures such as square, rectilinear and hexagonal, as well as an emerging field of 3-dimensional structures. Although these patterns have provided stiffness and rigidity whilst reducing the production time of FDM prototypes, many do not consider the actual loading conditions of the part in-situ, where it is argued that further significant gains in the performance could be achieved. This includes further reduction in process time and increased part functionality.

Thus, this paper presents initial work into the generation of an infill that is derived from the predicted stress profile for the part. This has been achieved through the post-processing of Finite Element (FE) models to identify the stress profile. Interpolation across these profiles leads to a set of aligned Bezier splines that enable the transmission of force and are also able to be manufactured using FDM. These splines are embedded within the typical slicing procedure of a part ahead of being manufactured on a FDM machine. Initial results from parts designed to support three-point bending loads show a 79% increase in the stiffness of the part alongside a consistent and repeatable mode of failure when compared to the commonly used honeycomb infill design.

Social Media & Society International Conference, 2016

Social media penetration has compelled higher education and organisations to consider the role of... more Social media penetration has compelled higher education and organisations to consider the role of social media in various novel pedagogical learning settings . We explored social media communication and perceptions of undergraduate engineers involved in an industrially focused annual worldwide competition to design and develop a racing car, where students are allocated project management and team leadership responsibilities (

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM15), Oct 2015

The development of Computer Aided Design (CAD) models is a fundamental and distinct feature of En... more The development of Computer Aided Design (CAD) models is a fundamental and distinct feature of Engineering Projects. CAD models can be considered to be the digital embodiment of the products’ design and are used to support a wide variety of tasks that span the embodiment, detail, manufacture and commissioning phases of a project. With this in mind, it is proposed that the monitoring and modelling of the edit trace behaviour of CAD files may provide additional understanding and evidence that supplements current approaches to monitor and manage engineering projects.

To explore this proposition, this paper presents results from an exploratory study that seeks to model the edit trace behaviour of CAD files based upon their meta- data attributes (for example, file size, date modified & date accessed). The edit trace behaviour has been mapped to a sigmoid function in order to be able to describe and potentially predict future behaviour. The potential impact of being able to provide this type of information to engineering project management is also discussed.

International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, 2015

Product service plays an essential role in day-today operations of nowadays manufacturing industr... more Product service plays an essential role in day-today operations of nowadays manufacturing industries. However, the changing demands of the market/customers, the increasing complexity of product functionalities and the extended product lifecycles present challenges to related In-Service projects. In order to handle the increasing number of projects and to control the costs and resource consumptions, it is critical to improve the efficiency and automation of process management. Within this context, this paper introduces some data-driven approaches to interpret and represent changes of project process over time in an automatic manner. These approaches aim to help project actors improve their understanding of process structure and the efficiency of process management, and also enable them to investigate process changes from more dynamic perspectives. To evaluate the approaches, a dataset from an aerospace organisation is considered in this paper.

Design Science, 2019

Design structure matrices (DSMs) are widely known for their ability to support engineers in the ... more Design structure matrices (DSMs) are widely known for their ability to support engineers in the management of dependencies across product and organisational architectures. Recent work in the field has exploited product lifecycle management systems to generate DSMs via the co-occurrence of edits to engineering files. These are referred to as dynamic DSMs and results have demonstrated both the efficacy and accuracy of dynamic DSMs in representing engineering work and emergent product architectures. The wide-ranging applicability of the theoretical model and associated analytical process to generate dynamic DSMs enables investigations into the evolving structures within digital engineering work. This paper uses this new capability and presents the results of the world’s first comparison of dynamic DSMs from a set of near-identical systems design projects. Through comparison of the dynamic DSMs’ end-of-project state, change propagation characteristics and evolutionary behaviour, 10 emergent structures are elicited. These emergent structures are considered in the context of team performance and design intent in order to explain and code the identified structures. The significance of these structures for the management of future systems design projects in terms of productivity and efficacy is also described.

IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, 2018

Due to the situational and contextual individuality of engineering work, the in-progress monitori... more Due to the situational and contextual individuality of engineering work, the in-progress monitoring and assessment of those factors that contribute to the success and performance in a given scenario poses a distinct and unresolved challenge, with heavy reliance on managerial skill and interpretation. Termed engineering project health management (EPHM), this paper presents a novel approach and framework for monitoring of engineering work through data-driven and computational analytics that in turn support the managerial interpretation and generation of higher level, context-specific understanding. EPHM is formed through the first adaptation of integrated vehicle health management (IVHM) to the field of engineering management; an approach that has been used to-date for the machine monitoring and predictive maintenance. The approach is applied to four industrial cases, which demonstrates the generation of project-specific information. The approach thereby acts to increase understanding of an engineering activity and a work state, and is complementary to existing managerial toolsets and approaches. A key tenet of the adaption of IVHM is to place the manager in a central role, supporting their professional judgment while reducing investigative effort. Index Terms—Engineering management, integrated vehicle health management (IVHM), project management, process monitoring and control, project performance, project success factors.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has and continues to experience considerable market and technological... more Additive manufacturing (AM) has and continues to experience considerable market and technological growth with many forecasting a tripling in market value over the next decade. One of the primary drivers for this growth is the increased freedom afforded to the design of both the external form and internal structure of fabricated parts. This freedom presents greater opportunities in optimising a parts mechanical properties, (such as strength, stiffness and mass), which in turn leads to enhanced performance whilst potentially reducing material use and hence, environmental impact. Realising this potential will further increase the viability of AM for a greater range of engineering contexts.

Correspondingly, the contribution of this paper lies in the creation and validation of a method for the topological optimisation of the infill structure of fused deposition modelled (FDM) components. The proposed method uses results attained from finite element analysis (FEA) to influence the design of the internal structure (i.e. infill) by locally varying the composition of the infill based upon the associated stress values. This paper presents and discusses the proposed method, and demonstrates the generalisability of the method through its ability to handle complex geometries and loading conditions, and manufacturing process constraints. In addition, the paper validates the method through testing of FDM beams comprised of FEA influenced and standard honeycomb infill designs undergoing four different loading scenarios. The validation reveals that a three and a half times increase in strength can be achieved where the stress profiles are well defined within the structure. In addition, the FEA-influenced beams exhibited more consistent failure mode profiles, which maybe desirable for designing parts with specific failure mode characteristics. Keywords Topology optimisation · Internal geometry · Infill · Internal structure · Fused deposition modelling (FDM) · Finite element analysis (FEA)

Sales of extrusion 3D printers have seen a rapid growth and the market value is expected to tripl... more Sales of extrusion 3D printers have seen a rapid growth and the market value is expected to triple over the next decade. This rapid growth can be attributed to a step change in capability and an increase in demand for 3D printed parts within mechanical, industrial and civil engineering processes. Correspondingly, a new technical prototyping platform – commonly referred to as FabLabs – has emerged to provide a stimulus for local education, entrepreneurship, innovation and invention through the provision of on-demand 3D printing and prototyping services. Central to the effectiveness of the on-demand 3D printing and prototyping services – hereby referred to as 3D Managed Print Services (3D MPS) – is their ability to handle multiple users with varying knowledge and understanding of the manufacturing processes, and scaling numbers of 3D printers in order to maximise productivity of the service. It is this challenge of productivity and more specifically, the scalability and scheduling of prints that is considered in this paper. The effect of scale and scheduling strategies on productivity is investigated through the modelling of four scheduling strategies for 3D MPS of varying scale by altering the number of available printers and level of user demand. The two most common approaches (First-come first serve & On-line continuous queue) and two alternatives based on bed space optimisation (First-fit decreasing height & First-fit decreasing height with a genetic algorithm) have been considered. Through Monte-Carlo simulation and comparison of the strategies, it is shown that increasing the scale of a 3D MPS improves the peak productivity and range of user demands at which the 3D MPS remains productive. In addition, the alternative strategies are able to double the peak productivity of a 3D MPS as well as increase the user demand range where the 3D MPS remains productive.

Dealing with component interactions and dependencies remains a core and fundamental aspect of eng... more Dealing with component interactions and dependencies remains a core and fundamental aspect of engineering, where conflicts and constraints are solved on an almost daily basis. Failure to consider these interactions and dependencies can lead to costly overruns, failure to meet requirements, and lengthy redesigns. Thus, the management and monitoring of these dependencies remains a crucial activity in engineering projects and is becoming ever more challenging with the increase in the number of components, component interactions, and component dependencies, in both a structural and a functional sense. For these reasons, tools and methods to support the identification and monitoring of component interactions and dependencies continues to be an active area of research. In particular, design structure matrices (DSMs) have been extensively applied to identify and visualize product and organizational architectures across a number of engineering disciplines. However , the process of generating these DSMs has primarily used surveys, structured interviews, and/or meetings with engineers. As a consequence, there is a high cost associated with engineers' time alongside the requirement to continually update the DSM structure as a product develops. It follows that the proposition of this paper is to investigate whether an automated and continuously evolving DSM can be generated by monitoring the changes in the digital models that represent the product. This includes models that are generated from computer-aided design, finite element analysis, and computational fluid dynamics systems. The paper shows that a DSM generated from the changes in the product models corroborates with the product architecture as defined by the engineers and results from previous DSM studies. In addition, further levels of product architecture dependency were also identified. A particular affordance of automatically generating DSMs is the ability to continually generate DSMs throughout the project. This paper demonstrates the opportunity for project managers to monitor emerging product dependencies alongside changes in modes of working between the engineers. The application of this technique could be used to support existing product life cycle change management solutions, cross-company product development, and small to medium enterprises who do not have a product life cycle management solution.

Journal of Advanced Engineering Informatics, Aug 23, 2013

Engineering Design Communication (EDC) is fundamental to almost all Engineering Design activities... more Engineering Design Communication (EDC) is fundamental to almost all Engineering Design activities as it provides the ability for knowledge and information to be shared between engineers. It is part of ‘what we do’. This communication contains a great deal of rationale relating to the evolution of Product Development and is essential for understanding ‘why the product is the way it is’. The need to support EDC is becoming more important due to the fact that Product Development is becoming more distributed, multi-disciplinary and involving greater re-use of past designs. With the advent of Social Media (SM), it is argued that there is the technical capability to provide more effective support for EDC within a computer-mediated environment. In order to explore this potential, this paper defines the requirements for the effective support of EDC through an extensive review of the literature. It then discusses the suitability of a SM approach and then presents the theoretical foundations of a SM framework to support EDC.

Advanced Engineering Informatics, May 28, 2015

Engineering Design Communication is the main tributary for the sharing of information, knowledge ... more Engineering Design Communication is the main tributary for the sharing of information, knowledge & insights, and is fundamental to engineering work. Engineers spend a significant portion of their day communicating as they 'fill in the gaps' left by formal documentation and processes. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that there is much extant literature on this subject. The majority has been descriptive with little prescriptive research involving the introduction of either a tool or process. To begin to address this, previous work reports a Social Media framework to support Engineering Design Communication and this paper builds upon this previous work through the instantiation of the framework within a custom-built Social Media tool hereto referred to as PartBook. This has been prescribed within an eleven week race car design project. The study addresses the validation of the requirements that underpin the Social Media framework as well as investigating the impact the tool has/may have on engineering work, engineering artefacts and engineering project management. In order to do so, data has been captured through user activity, system usability, questionnaire, semi-structured interview and informal feedback.

Engineers Talk Be it through conversations, meetings, informal discussion, phone calls or E-Mail... more Engineers Talk

Be it through conversations, meetings, informal discussion, phone calls or E-Mail, Engineering Design Communication is the main tributary for the sharing of knowledge, thoughts and ideas, and therefore, fundamental to Engineering Work. An engineer spends a significant portion of their day communicating as they 'fill in the gaps' left by formal documentation and processes. It is thereby, an inherent source of explicit design rationale that relates to (and very often supplements) Engineering Records and their generation. Engineering Design Communication is not only central for Engineering Work and Records but also offers potential - through aggregation - to reveal underlying features, patterns and signatures that could aid current and future Engineering Project Management.

As Engineering Design Communication plays such a pivotal role, it comes as no surprise that there is much extant research. The majority of this is descriptive and has focused on identifying patterns in engineers’ communication behaviour as well as analysing the utility of currently employed communication tools/mediums (such as, E-Mail and meetings). However, little prescriptive research - through either a tool or process - has been undertaken. This may be due to the considerable challenges facing research in this field such as the need to maintain a high-level of Engineering Context, ensure the right engineers are able to participate and associate the communication with its respective Engineering Records. All of which, has to be achieved within an Engineering Context where teams are becoming larger, more mobile, multi-disciplinary & distributed, and often performing variant or incremental design.

Although, it is argued that Social Media has the potential to militate these challenges through the use of technologies that provide agile development, support for ubiquitous com- puting and sharing of multimedia. Therefore, this thesis investigates how Social Media can be used to support Engineering Design Communication. This is achieved through the elici- tation and synthesis of the requirements for supporting Engineering Design Communication, and consideration of the e↵ective application of the Social Media. This forms the basis from which a Social Media approach to support Engineering Design Communication is created and then instantiated within a tool called PartBook. PartBook has been developed iteratively and involved an industrial study to evaluate and improve functionality.

It has since been used within an eleven week Formula Student project involving thirty- four students from multiple engineering disciplines in a distributed working environment. The analysis of which addresses the validation of the requirements that has led to amendments and generation of new requirements as well as evaluation of the Social Media approach that has led to insights into the potential impact such a tool could bring to Engineering Work, Records and Project Management.