Multidisciplinary Decision Making Methods in an Information Driven Product Development Framework

New paradigms and accompanying software systems are necessary to support the integration of system level design and discipline level analysis activities for the implementation of product lifecycle management. An information driven product development framework has been developed to integrate these activities using product information model to represents the associativities among design requirements, product models and design parameters. In this paper, product information model is used to not only integrate all the activities and software packages, but also enable formulating and solving design problems using appropriate solution methods. Two engineering examples are solved using three different methods, Genetic Algorithm, Game Based Decision Making method, and Collaborative Decision Making method. The three methods are compared by the numbers of calls to discipline level analysis models. It was shown that collaborative decision making method is capable of finding satisfying solutions with the least number of calls to the computing expensive analysis models.

Integrating Environmental Aspects in Eco-Design through a Product Information Model

Taking environmental factors into consideration is the primary demand and feature of eco-design. But the environmental factors are often numerous, trivial and related to the entire design phases, which make eco-design difficult to carry out. In order to address this problem, Product Information Model for Eco-design (PIMfE) based on the NIST CPM2 was proposed to provide an organizer and a standard representation for eco-design information. By extending the CPM2, environmental aspects, such as environmental norms, regulations, standards, material selection, disassembly, recycling and environmental impact evaluation, were integrated into product information model. Then the key activities of eco-design namely requirement analysis, detailed design and environmental evaluation could be supported by PIMfE. An example of keypad microphone is used to illustrate the suggested product information model and verify its validity.

Development of a Product Information Model to Support Replacement Analysis

For sustainability of environment, legislations in EU, USA, Japan and Australia require manufacturers to take back their products at the End of Life (EOL) and recycle them. The concept of 6R (reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, redesign and remanufacture) is very important for this issue, while reuse has the highest energy and material recovery efficiency. In this study, an integrated product information model has been developed in UML to provide necessary information for any future decision making activities in the EOL stage, such as the replacement analysis of any used part or subassembly. This product information model represents not only product structure but its function, behavior, and their associations in different abstract levels to support replacement analysis of an existing component with a new or a used component available to company. This representation schema provides necessary information for any future decision making activities in the EOL stage, such as the replacement or reuse of any part or subassembly. In an analysis of replacement for a faulty component with a used or new component, this model provides all of the associations of the existing artifact with other artifacts and the environment, not just functional and space requirements, and the relevant modification(s) of the associated objects has to be verified.

Garbage Crusher Variant Design Based on Parameterization

Garbage processing is an important content in environment protection.Garbage crusher plays a key role in garbage processing. To enhance design rapidity and quality of garbage crusher, a new garbage crusher variant design methodology based on parameterization is proposed. The principle of variant design based on parameterization is introducted. Parametric model of garbage crusher is established and analyzed. A new product information model is established according to the mating relationship type among constituent parts of assembly. The product information model included several sub-models. It can be droved by parametric dimension, which is defined by customers’ requirement to get customized product’s design scheme. Garbage crusher variant design plug-ins based on SolidWorks is developed with VC++. The garbage crusher’s variant design is implemented.

Product Information Model of MEMS

A lot of information needs to be processed in the MEMS design process, but this information lack the unified expression format at present. This causes the design stage of MEMS not to be able to share information, furthermore causes low design efficiency. A product information model is presented according to MEMS design stage. XML language is used to describe information of each design stage, and an information exchange and sharing platform model has been established to solve MEMS design data sharing and exchange bottleneck question. The XML technology makes the platform reusable and extensible.

A New Product Information Model for ERP Systems in Assembly-to-Order Environment

Basically, present enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) do not perform well in an assembly-to-order (ATO) environment due to the lack of effective management of product varieties. To support customized requirements and frequent engineering changes (ECs), we propose a manufacturing-oriented product information model (OMPIM), which consists of item property information and structure information. The proposed model has been applied to an ERP system of an automobile plant.

Similarity Assessment of Mechanical Parts Based on Integrated Product Information Model

To improve the quality of design, reduce the cost of production, and shorten the cycle of product development, an effective system to manage and reuse existing design resources is established. A novel two-step algorithm based on integrated product information model is put forward to analyze the reusability of design resources. First, the global shape ignoring the interior details is compared with check if they belong to the same category. Then, the detailed feature shape is compared with catch, the exact reusable design resources. Finally, a case study proves that the proposed method has higher accuracy.

Study on Fuzzy D-S Evidence Theory Mathematics Foundation Based on the Form Prototype

Form the prototype for the product information model, based on fuzzy reasoning DS product matrix form of semantic description of the design method, to achieve a quantitative description of design and analysis to lay the foundation. In this paper, a prototype of the product based on the patterns of conventional semantic patterns, based on the optimal degree of semantic preferences to identify patterns associated semantic description of the object word, based on the design of space and form of distribution of the overall evaluation of the products were analyzed, the establishment of a semantic matrix form as product design style formal description of the expression of the computer model to design the impact of drilling as an example to describe the effectiveness of the method.