Data-driven engineering design: A systematic review using scientometric approach

In the last two decades, data regarding engineering design and product development has increased rapidly. Big data exploration and mining offer numerous opportunities for engineering design; however, owing to the multitude of data sources and formats coupled with the high complexity of the design process, these techniques are yet to be utilised to the best of their full potential. In this study, a comprehensive assessment of the state-of-the-art data-driven engineering design (DDED) in the last 20 years was conducted. A scientometric approach was employed wherein first, a systematic article acquisition procedure was performed, where a dataset of 3339 articles related to engineering design and big data analytics applications were extracted from Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. Thereafter, this dataset was reduced to a dataset of 366 articles based on concise data screening. The resulting articles were used to analyse the dynamics of research in DDED throughout the last 20 years and to detect the primary research topics related to DDED, the most influential authors, and the papers with the highest impact in the DDED domain. Furthermore, the co-occurrence network of keywords/keyphrases and co-authorship networks were constructed and analysed to reveal the interconnection of the research topics and the collaboration between the most prolific authors. Finally, an insight how big data analytics is being applied through product development activities to support decision-making in engineering design was presented.