EVALUATION OF A STRATEGIC METHOD TO IMPROVE PROTOTYPE PERFORMANCE WITH REDUCED COST AND FABRICATION TIME

Prototyping is tied into many stages of product development, where implementation choices have critical effects on overall design outcome. We review six techniques for strategic prototyping and synthesize empirically derived heuristics for their application. The heuristics are integrated in a generalized method for strategic prototyping. Two complementary experiments are conducted to evaluate each technique, as well as one potential form of the method. Direct performance measurement quantifies the continued marginal performance increases associated with iteration (build and test cycle of a single concept), and the benefit of pursuing multiple design concepts. Results also show scaled prototyping, subsystem isolation, requirement relaxation, and virtual prototyping can reduce cost and fabrication time. The method is correlated with increased use of these techniques, and higher quantitative final performance. The strategy method is a broad planning tool that leads to improvement of final design performance and reducted fabrication cost and time. Potential areas for improvement are evaluation of: marginal benefits from many parallel concept tests, and alternate method layouts.