The Ecosystem for Learning and Team Design is a comprehensive design decision support system with the central purpose of uncovering design oversights early in the design process. The product addresses the following concern: "If a reliability problem is detected during the engineering phase, the cost of the product goes up by a factor of 10. However, if the problem is not detected until the production phase, the cost of the product increases by a factor of 100 or more". The Ecosystem for Learning and Team Design, developed under the SBIR Phase 1 grant by the NSF, has been used by capstone design teams at Portland State University, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, and New Mexico State University. It is in the process of being adapted to the needs of the Berkeley Formula Racing team. By integrating the design decision rules from the Ecosystem into SOLIDWORKS and deploying the solution as an add-on (in a similar fashion to the Xpress tools), there are great opportunities to help the SOLIDWORKS user community improve the fidelity of its design decisions.
