The acceleration of product development cycle continues to be a significant challenge for manufacturing firms around the world. This paper describes a task planning method for minimizing trial and error to reduce the development time in large-scale and complicated product development at the early stage of product development. The proposed method matches the group of product components according to geometry and determines the development sequence of each component to minimize the amount of feedback information across task groups. The method applies as evaluation index for task prioritization the product-sum of engineering interaction among components and worth of each component, the “worth flow.” The paper shows with an example of the generic hair drier with simple mechanical structure that this method contributes to the reduction of the size of task group by 22% and amount of information required for setting the interface links by 65% compared to the conventional planning methods.
A Hybrid Approach to Intricate Motion, Manipulation and Task Planning
