An application of data mining for product design

The aim of the investigation is to develop a system which will give product designers access to data and information from a range of corporate databases, deemed essential to their function-in particular, customer complaints, product material features, R&D testing. Access to these data may point to fundamental design anomalies or inefficiencies which would not have been otherwise apparent. The goals of the investigation therefore are: to providing a mechanism to enable information to be used from later life cycle stages by earlier ones; to provide this information in a format which would be understandable and useable to another product life-cycle function.