Verification activities increase an engineering team’s confidence in its system design meeting system requirements, which are derived from stakeholder needs. Conventional wisdom suggests that the system design should be verified frequently to minimize the cost of rework as the system design matures. However, this guideline is based on experience of engineers rather than a theoretical foundation. In this paper, we develop a belief-based model of verification of system design to determine the conditions under which it is cost-effective for an organization to verify the system design frequently. We study the model for a broad set of verification setup and rework costs. Our results show that verifying a system design frequently is not always a preferred verification strategy. Instead, it is an optimal strategy only when the costs of reworking a faulty design increase at a certain rate as the design matures.  


Is Verifying Frequently an Optimal Strategy? A Belief-Based Model of Verification

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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