This invention presents a transformative design decision support tool (an e-Design Assessment Engine), one that 1. Significantly reduces cost and risk of engineering design projects, over the state of affair, in part through early and automatic detection of design oversights; 2. Offers compelling reduction in the development time of designs, through improved productivity, but without compromising quality or creativity; 3. Offers wide range of flexibility in terms of supporting design processes employed at different design organizations. The design oversights are identified through proper structuring of the engineering design requirements, extraction of relevant design parameters through application program interfaces provided by the pertinent design tools, and mapping against the requirements. Big data analytics are applied to repositories of past designs, for the purpose of improving new designs. The Engine can be used stand-alone, as a part of a design ecosystem, or integrated into existing systems for product lifecycle or data management.