Integrated Engineering, Geometric, and Customer Modeling: LCD Projector Design Case Study

This paper describes an integrated product design study conducted with Polaroid Corporation for a liquid crystal display video projector, applying a research system called DOME. The services of distributed objects — encapsulating CAE simulations, component catalogs, manufacturing cost models, geometric and configuration models, customer preference models, and environmental life-cycle assessment — are mathematically related to form an integrated product system model. Software objects providing optimization and decision support are also included in the model to create a design tradeoff environment. As such, designers can obtain sales predictions based upon configuration changes and make tradeoffs with other requirements. Benchmarking suggests there would be approximately a 30% increase in the time to fully evaluate the first design configuration due to the overhead of creating the integrated system model. However, the time to fully evaluate subsequent alternatives may be reduced from months to minutes.