Abstract
In order to be globally competitive, contemporary enterprises are eager to find out innovative ways to improve their product development efficiency. Therefore, it is prevalent to take so-called “life-cycle factors” into account when doing product design. These life-cycle factors include fabrication, operation, maintenance, logistic, disposal, and so forth. Design rationale explains why and how a product is designed as it is, and it is a kind of corporate technical memory that affects the core competence of manufacturing enterprises. Since a number of iterations and tradeoff studies are unavoidable during product design process; thus, decreasing the iterations definitely improve product design cycle. It is a trend to incorporate modern IT into product design process, and a design decision support system is useful in facilitating design cycle and for reuse of existing design experience. In this research, both of the iterative nature of engineering design process and the interrelationship between life cycle factors and design decisions are studied. Secondly, the frameworks of decision support system presented by other researchers are discussed. Then, the fastener selection procedures and associated factors are depicted through suitable influence diagram and decision tree under the background of aircraft structure design. Besides, variable constraint equations are used as quantitative models for searching appropriate fasteners in supplier’s database. A prototype of web-based aircraft fastener selection decision support system is introduced and implemented subsequently. Consequence of the system implementation followed by the prospect of future development is discussed in the conclusion of the thesis.