Information management systems are being developed and introduced to engineering design activities to help companies reuse their information. This trend has been identified in multi-location companies, which operate design departments at various locations. Investigating how multi-location companies can configure their information management environment to fulfil engineers' information needs in design process opens up a research topic for us. A well configured information management environment will require a clear understanding of what designers need from it. A literature review has identified that only a few studies have observed the way in which design practitioners work in an industrial environment; and since these studies were all conducted 10 or 20 years ago within a specific context, their findings may no longer reflect current practice. The first phase of this research investigates the information needs of designers in the vehicle industry, and the different approaches and resources that they currently adopt to fulfil these needs. The findings of this first phase of research are then used to identify further industry-based studies. The second phase of the research focuses on the structures and operations of information management for engineering design. A case study of four multi-location companies was conducted to understand their information management environments (IMEs). Primary data was collected in fieldwork visits to the companies. Inductive grounded coding was applied to analyse the data, revealing the constructs of information management environments at the case companies studied. The analyses identified strategic orientations, structures, organisational enablers and individuals' capabilities in case companies' IMEs. A new classification of IMEs was proposed to understand their structural and operational features. The analyses have implications for how companies should configure their IMEs. The studies reported in this dissertation contribute to theory by providing an understanding of the configuration of IMEs in companies and proposing ways of configuring IMEs in practice. Researchers in the domain of information systems can develop a good understanding of how professional practitioners interact with information environments so that they can propose information management systems or methods that make tangible improvements. This study also helps engineers map out the information environment that they search to acquire information. Chief engineers or managers in companies who are in charge of information management can benefit from the understanding of their own information environment and use the proposed model as a guide to configure their own information management environments. The study also suggests future research directions, such as identifying and proposing the indicators that can be used to measure the performance of information management.

Using web-based knowledge management systems has become the mainstream when enterprises adopt the strategy of knowledge management. With the accumulated amount of materials, the issue of information reuse is emphasized, and how to properly design a knowledge management system to improve the efficiency of information reuse is becoming extremely important. In the past there were two approaches for improving the efficiency of information reuse. One is knowledge map that focuses on information retrieval to promote the efficiency, and the other is usability of Human-Computer Interaction that focuses on the effect of different information representation styles and the user's liking. According to Task-Technology Fit, the greater the degree of adherence to an ideal fit profile, the better the performance. In this study we discussed the impact of information presentation styles on information reuse with different reuse tasks on knowledge management systems. The study is intended as an experimental design to investigate the impact of information presentation styles on information reuse within a knowledge management system. We use an experiment involving 83 subjects. The results of this study indicate that information presentation styles have a significant impact on information reuse. We found that for retrieval tasks, the impact on information reuse would be enhanced with the hierarchical presentation style. Additionally, the result also shows that when increasing the complexity of the task, information presentation styles have no differences to the impact on information reuse. And according to the results of two kinds of questionnaires, the users all had higher liking and partialities for the hierarchical presentation style. Finally, suggestions for the vision information design based on the results of this study are provided.

Formulations of optimization under uncertainty (OUU) commonly used in aerospace design—those based on treating statistical moments of the quantity of interest (QOI) as separate objectives—can result in stochastically dominated designs. A stochastically dominated design is undesirable, because it is less likely than another design to achieve a QOI at least as good as a given value, for any given value. As a remedy to this limitation for the multi-objective formulation of moments, a novel OUU formulation is proposed—dominance optimization. This formulation seeks a set of solutions and makes use of global optimizers, so is useful for early stages of the design process when exploration of design space is important. Similarly, to address this limitation for the single-objective formulation of moments (combining moments via a weighted sum), a second novel formulation is proposed—horsetail matching. This formulation can make use of gradient- based local optimizers, so is useful for later stages of the design process when exploitation of a region of design space is important. Additionally, horsetail matching extends straightforwardly to different representations of uncertainty, and is flexible enough to emulate several existing OUU formulations. Existing multi-fidelity methods for OUU are not compatible with these novel formulations, so one such method—information reuse—is generalized to be compatible with these and other formulations. The proposed formulations, along with generalized information reuse, are compared to their most comparable equivalent in the current state-of-the-art on practical design problems: transonic aerofoil design, coupled aero-structural wing design, high-fidelity 3D wing design, and acoustic horn shape design. Finally, the two novel formulations are combined in a two-step design process, which is used to obtain a robust design in a challenging version of the acoustic horn design problem. Dominance optimization is given half the computational budget for exploration; then horsetail matching is given the other half for exploitation. Using exactly the same computational budget as a moment-based approach, the design obtained using the novel formulations is 95% more likely to achieve a better QOI than the best value achievable by the moment-based design.