Methodology

Regarding objective 1, i.e. determine the scope and size of CAD quality-related problems in industrial settings, Web questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with CAD professionals will be conducted to help to define the areas to be explored through quantitative methods. This type of interviews consists of several key questions that help to focus the discussion topic, but also allows the interviewer or interviewee to diverge in order to explore an idea or response in more detail. Since an open questionnaire with plain (unstructured) text is proposed, the participants’ responses will be interpreted by the research team, which is common practice in these types of analyses. Naturally, a certain degree of subjectivity is unavoidable.

The rest of the objectives of the CAD-Q project are supported by a research strategy inspired by the Design Science Research Methodology [PTR07] and Action Research Methodology [AKM02]. In this way, the development of modeling methodologies is based on a first phase of analysis of existing methodologies to identify those aspects that have a more positive impact on the quality of the model. For that, it is necessary to have a significant dataset of CAD models created applying each of these methodologies and tools that allow the evaluation of these models against criteria such as computational efficiency, preservation of design intent in the face of changes, robustness against modifications and ease of editing among other factors.

From the conclusions obtained in the previous phase and complemented by the knowledge and experience of the members of the research team, a proposal for the synthesis of the new modeling methodology will be generated, which must be applied to the creation of a new instance of models of the dataset, to then apply the evaluation tools indicated above.

The next task is, after reflecting on the results obtained from the evaluation, to detect areas of improvement in the new methodology. This leads to a new iteration, where the updated methodology is applied again following the steps previously described. After several cycles of iteration, the modeling methodologies will reach the required maturity level and will be shared and discussed with the industrial companies supporting this research project.

The application of the methodologies requires the selection of some commercial CAD systems to apply the methodologies and develop the support applications to evaluate their performance. Considering the previous developments made on DS Solidworks by our research team and that some of the companies supporting the project work with Siemens NX, these two systems are expected to be the chosen ones.