Modeling and management of design requirements in product development life cycle

The traditional product development strategy has shifted from first-to-market to right-to-market and the product development paradigm has also evolved from procedure-focused to customer-needs-fulfillment-focused. How to develop the product that really meets customers' wants and provides "tailor-made" features for individual needs is critical in contemporary product development. To avoid the product development behind schedule, over budget, possible runaway, or not the product customer wants, the design requirements are critical design information, which should always be available for easily accessing, retrieving, updating, changing, sharing and re-using in product development lifecycle since they drive and navigate the design activities and are used as the yardsticks or crietria to evaluate, verify and validate design solutions. To achieve this goal, the design requirements should be efficiently modeled and managed. In this paper, the modeling and management of design requirements are addressed. Foremost, the models of modeling and management processes are proposed and the detailed definitions are articulated. The issues in each process are presented and how to address them is proposed. From system point of view, a system framework is orchestrated and the components under the framework and their relationships are then delineated. A system information and process flow is presented and how to embed and package the developed technologies into a system is illustrated via the system information and process flow and GUIs.