Performance assessment of heterogeneous engineering tools along the development process of manufacturing systems

Information technology tool chains are an integral component within development processes. When aligned optimally and adapted to the particular company's needs, they ensure process efficiency and product quality while transforming an initial idea into a mature solution. The increasing amount of discipline specific software tools in combination with the heterogeneous mixture of these tools from different software suppliers outline today's challenge in finding the optimal tailored IT tool chain. This paper describes a methodology that assesses the holistic performance of digital engineering tool chains and establishes a performance index for comparing various chains with each other by a hierarchy-oriented weighted scoring method.