A Comparative Study of Engineering Change Management in Three Swedish Engineering Companies

This paper analyses the engineering change management (EC) process in three engineering companies in Sweden. In the paper, the influence of various company specific factors, such as change leadtime, on the design of the EC process are analysed. The current use of computer support is surveyed and the possibility to apply a modern product data management (PDM) system to support the process is analysed. The paper also presents different strategies for improving the engineering change management process as well as of the product data management systems in order to achieve an optimal process.

An Infrastructure to Support Closed Loop Product Development Practice Coupled With Rapid Prototyping

This paper deals with a methodology to use rapid prototyping and tooling to aid the product development practice. Under the support of the distributive activity scheduling mechanism and the unified product data model, a closed loop is described, which consists of design-phase-oriented requirement analysis of RP/RT applications, multi-criterion decision-making mechanism for selecting the combination of materials, RP method, and RP process chain, process planning for rapid prototyping and tooling, data collections from RP manufacturing, design evaluations based on manufactured prototypes, as well as case-based learning from RP process chain. Here, quality function deployment is used for quality control and assurance of such a design closed cycle. Several such closed loops during product design procedure will make the product go to a optimal solution. In addtion, concurrence and competence issues inside a closed loop design evaluation cycle are also discussed. Finally, a conclusion about this methodology is drawn.

Interoperability of Assembly Analysis Applications Through the Use of the Open Assembly Design Environment

The emergence of high performance computing has opened up new avenues for the design and analysis community. Integrated Product/Process Design techniques are allowing multi-functional teams to simultaneously optimize the design of a product. These techniques can be inhibited, however, due to software integration and data exchange issues. The work outlined in this paper focuses on these issues as they relate to the design and analysis of electro-mechanical assemblies. The first effort of this work is the creation of an open environment, called the Open Assembly Design Environment. The goal of this environment is to integrate the otherwise disparate assembly design tools using a central control system and a common set of data. These design tools include virtual reality based design systems, computer-aided design systems, design for assembly systems and process planning systems. This paper outlines the overall goals of the project, presents the architecture designed for the system, describes the interfaces developed to integrate the systems, and discusses the data representation requirements for a system integrating a virtual reality system with computer-aided design systems.

Supporting Product Development With Innovative Technologies and Methods

In this paper, we discuss the two different innovative tools, Digital Mock-Ups and Rapid Prototyping, and their key features. To make sure that their use is adapted to the needs of the company, different aspects of implementation in industrial practice are discussed.

A Data Approach to Tracking and Evaluating Engineering Changes

Changes are common during any stage of a product life cycle. There are local changes that do not influence other elements of a product. However, there are other changes that can influence different aspects of the product. Consequences of these changes, unless properly anticipated, and accounted for, can be costly. Therefore, it is highly desirable to obtain a mechanism that will be able to anticipate and evaluate product change consequences. The first task in anticipating and evaluating change consequences is to represent them. The complexity of engineering models makes their representation to be rich and semantic. Information data models like EXPRESS provide tools for modeling products. However, the current EXPRESS and other information models do not have a generic methodology to support contextual change representation and propagation. In this paper a methodology called Change FAvorable Representation – C-FAR is presented. C-FAR uses an existing product information model to facilitate change representation, propagation, and qualitative evaluation. The EXPRESS schema’s main elements are entities, relations among entities, and attributes that describe the entities. C-FAR facilitates change and change evaluation to the attribute level. C-FAR has been evaluated using case studies in structural analysis, and bumper design. Results show that C-FAR is capable of representing change and provides a reasonable qualitative evaluation of the change consequences.

A Concurrent Function Deployment Process for Product Life-Cycle Management

In this paper, an alternate framework for deployment called Concurrent Function Deployment (CFD) for managing a product’s life-cycle process is described. The framework considers parallel deployment of several value characteristics as opposed to a single value such as Quality. The American Supplier Institute’s (ASI’s) quality function deployment (QFD) concept [Sullivan, 1988] is a typical case of a conventional four-phased deployment process, where quality is the prime consideration for deploying life cycle functions. CFD is not based on using a single measurement, such as “Quality“ as in ASI’s QFD. Six concurrent values, namely Functionality (Quality), Performance (X-ability), Tools & Technology (innovation), Cost, Responsiveness, and Infrastructure (delivery) are considered simultaneously in CFD rather than serially in QFD. Three-dimensional Value Characteristics Matrices (VCM) are employed to ensure that both the company and the customers’ goals are optimally met. In the present setting, ASI’s deployment scenario emerges as a special case of Concurrent Function Deployment. CFD enables the planners and strategic decision-makers — early on during a design process — to deal with tradeoffs among the crucial factors of artifact values.

Web-Based Collaborative Design Modeling and Decision Support

This paper presents an integrated but open product development environment for distributed and collaborative design. The web-based framework, called DOME, allows designers to build integrated models using both local and distributed resources and to collaborate by exchanging services. Thus, an integrated model can be created while each participant focuses on their own area of expertise. A design model is created by connecting modules, each of which can represent specific components, analysis capabilities/software, disciplines, or organizations relevant to the problem. The modules interact with each other using service exchanges based upon the CORBA standard communication protocol for distributed objects. The resulting module network forms a concurrent model in which changes propagate through service exchanges. Modules can simultaneously function as both clients (using services from other modules) and servers (providing services to other modules). A Java applet-based user interface provides cross-platform and distributed user access to DOME module servers throughout the network.

Modeling of Incomplete and Uncertain Information in Relational Database for Engineering Design and Production Management: Review and Future Work

The current engineering design and production management puts an essential requirement on information modeling and manipulation, i.e., the need to represent evolutionary information with engineering and production processes. Such a need requires dealing with so called incomplete and uncertain information, which will be discussed in this paper. The contribution of the paper includes an elaboration of the information soundness (in database). Based on this elaboration the need to represent incomplete and uncertain information is explained. The state of the art of the representation and the manipulation of incomplete and uncertain information in database is then shown in a relational database environment. This will also include the authors’ work. Finally, some ideas on future work are discussed, including an important observation, i.e., the need to study fuzzy probabilistic information.