This grant provides funding for the development of tools and methods to manage variation risk during the early stages of product development. The methods will use a common model set to enable an integrated approach to variation management by linking identification of risk areas, the consequence and likelihood of failure as well as the development of strategies to mitigate risk. Variation risk identification will be achieved by identifying the system level Key Characteristics(KCs) of a product -- the product features, manufacturing process parameters, and assembly features that significantly affect a product -- and flowing them down to the contributing features. The likelihood of risk will be measured by propagating the expected variation through the model. These measures will be used to weight the relative importance of a set of system level KCs and begin to determine the best approach for mitigating risk. Tools to measure the likelihood and consequence of variation risk under uncertainty will also be developed. Three risk mitigation strategies will be developed by this research: change the product architecture to create a more robust design, improve the manufacturing process to reduce the input variation, and/or implement measurement plans to track variation in production. The tools will be used to optimize the selection of the lowest cost mitigation strategy. The early identification and mitigation of variation risk will enable product developers to increase product complexity, reduce design cycle times, and improve the cost and quality of the products. Specifically, these methods will reduce several consequences of variation--design changes, institutionalized rework, and low quality. The use of the integrated models will enable an organization to effectively manage risk throughout the development and production of the product. The use of quantitative methods will improve the efficiency and accuracy of the risk management process.
