Improve Syntax Correctness and Breadth of Design Space Exploration in Functional Analysis

Functional analysis aims to decompose the main functions of a product, which can be large and complex, into more manageable subfunctions. Recently, interest in explicitly considering users during functional modeling has grown to enhance analysis completeness, but how this addresses some commonly reported challenges for novice engineers is not clear. This research proposes and assesses a simple way to streamline user considerations in functional analysis as potential mitigation for some challenges (i.e., difficulty in identifying functions to explore design space and expressing the functions with expected syntax and solution neutrality) that novice designers frequently mention at the early design stage. Analysis of the results indicates that embedding requirements into a user workflow supports novice designers generate significantly more functions with correct syntax than starting with requirements only. In addition, the exploration space is prominently broader, especially at the higher levels measured by the geometry of the generated hierarchical models. These results suggest that strategically incorporating user considerations, even in a simple way, positively addresses the common challenges. This initial exploration and assessment could serve as an inspiration for future research on more efficient ways to streamline the functional decomposition process and, in turn, better support subsequent systematic conceptual design.