Towards process change impact analysis in industrial engineering

Today, the development of large systems, is more and more based on new model driven design methods that try to overcome gaps between the engineering domains. These design methods are often allocated to the design phase to avoid deep process iterations. Their impact on the process outcome can be tremendous but is not well understood. Existing impact analysis methods frequently fail to provide the required flexibility and capability that are necessary to analyze the impact of design methods in terms of precision and efficiency. Therefore, new analysis methods and models that allow an appropriate impact estimation of such design methods on the product development process are required to provide an adequate information basis for profound management decisions. This paper derives requirements from a use case for an impact analysis of new design methods in product development and investigates the gap between the existing state-of-the-art and the derived requirements.