Semantic interoperability for an integrated product development process: a systematic literature review

International audienceGlobal competitiveness challenges manufacturing industry to rationalise different ways of bringing to the market new products in a short lead-time with competitive prices while ensuring higher quality levels and customisation. Industries need to effectively share heterogeneous information during Product Development Process (PDP) within and across their institutional boundaries to be competitive. However, problems with misinterpretation and mistakes have been identified during information exchange due to the semantic interoperability obstacles. Thus, this research proposes a systematic literature review to identify the main researches and the milestones reference works on semantic interoperability field. A rigorous methodology was conducted in different databases, covering the articles published in scientific journals from 2005 to 2015 as a preliminary study had indicated that the incidence of articles related to the subject was more frequent from the second half of the 2000s. The research structure consisted of four steps: Survey-searching, analysis and selection of recent researches; Categorization-categorization of the selected papers; References citation frequency analysis-the selected papers were analysed and the main researches and milestones references were identified; and Main researches critical analysis – the main researches were analysed for their contributions and limitations, their contributions and limitations, resulting in 14 selected scientific articles and 8 identified milestones references. It is evident that this field has interesting perspectives on future research opportunities on semantic interoperability of information issues across PDP, contributing to the new concepts of future factories

Identifying design requirements for emerging markets

The manufacturing industry’s interest in emerging markets has been increasing dramatically during the recent decades as their economy is growing. Western companies are making efforts to develop products for emerging markets but are also facing various challenges in the process of doing so. One major challenge is the identification of reliable and valuable design requirements. This study aims at investigating the influence of the emerging market context on the practice of identifying design requirements. A survey among Danish industry was conducted with 130 responses collected. 92 answers provided an insight into design requirement identification in a western context, whereas 62 provided an insight into both emerging and western contexts. The results indicate the importance of design requirement identification when developing for emerging markets. Requirement elicitation and analysis are the most challenging phases in a design requirement identification process for both western and emerging markets. For Danish companies, identifying design requirements for emerging markets is more difficult than that for western markets, particularly when considering user needs, governmental regulations and organizational infrastructures

Predicting Requirement Change Propagation Using Higher Order Design Structure Matrices: An Industry Case Study

This research examines higher order design structure matrices as requirements change modelling tools to predict requirement change propagation through two large-scale industry design projects. Due to the iterative nature of design, requirements will evolve and change. Changes in requirements can propagate to other requirements on different subsystems leading to possible increases in the project cost and lead-time. Predicting these requirement changes enables the designers to foresee unanticipated changes and maximises the probability for the project\u27s success. These studies reveal that second-order relationships are influential in predicting requirement change propagation. Unforeseen propagation occurring in first-order form was rare, rather it was occurring in second order. Modelling requirements change exposes these secondary relationships early in the engineering change (EC) definition process, thereby enhancing the decision-making process and augmenting cost estimation. A modelling tool, such as that proposed in this paper, can provide the designer insight into the requirements which may be affected before approving an EC

Comparative Analysis of Requirements Change Prediction Models: Manual, Linguistic, and Neural Network

Requirement change propagation, if not managed, may lead to monetary losses or project failure. The a posteriori tracking of requirement dependencies is a well-established practice in project and change management. The identification of these dependencies often requires manual input by one or more individuals with intimate knowledge of the project. Moreover, the definition of these dependencies that help to predict requirement change is not currently found in the literature. This paper presents two industry case studies of predicting system requirement change propagation through three approaches: manually, linguistically, and bag-of-words. Dependencies are manually and automatically developed between requirements from textual data and computationally processed to develop surrogate models to predict change. Two types of relationship generation, manual keyword selection and part-of-speech tagging, are compared. Artificial neural networks are used to create surrogate models to predict change. These approaches are evaluated on three connectedness metrics: shortest path, path count, and maximum flow rate. The results are given in terms of search depth needed within a requirements document to identify the subsequent changes. The semi-automated approach yielded the most accurate results, requiring a search depth of 11 %, but sacrifices on automation. The fully automated approach is able to predict requirement change within a search depth of 15 % and offers the benefits of full minimal human input

Modeling Business Process Workflow of SMEs Using Environment Based Design with a Case Study of Valtech Fabrication Incorporation

Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) account for over 95% of firms in most countries. In Quebec, SMEs account for 96% of all businesses. SMEs are important for economic growth and they are strong contributors to productivity. Some of the challenges of SMEs are the lack of financing, difficulties in using technology, constrained managerial capabilities, or inefficient productivity. Among challenges of SMEs, finance and inefficient productivity can be considered as two of the most important issues that slows down their growth. Finance issues can be referred to as the lack of money in investing in new technologies, hiring competent resources, and investing in new equipment. To improve the financial status of a company and increase the profit, we can either increase the revenue or decrease the expenses. The objective of this project is to target the finance issue as well as inefficient productivity of the SMEs and improve both of them by developing a workflow model. Workflow refers to a method for improving business process management, and an effective workflow can help the decision-makers in an enterprise to develop pathways leading to the reduction of costs and wastes. It employs the Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology which not only designs an effective workflow but also analyses the environment of the business to find the root causes of the issues to help the SMEs improve their finance issue by increasing the operation and production efficiency and effectiveness

Computer-assisted transformation of design documents from a natural language description to structured modeling languages

In the present thesis, a novel approach is proposed to transform design documents described by a natural language into a structured modeling languages, particularly UML diagrams and FBS models. The transformation consists of two steps: (i) From natural language to an intermediate graphic language called Recursive Object Model (ROM). (ii) From a ROM diagram to a modeling language. The ROM diagram corresponding to a text includes the main semantic information implied in the text by modeling the relations between the words in a text. Based on the semantics implied in the ROM diagram, a set of criteria is proposed to mine the semantic meaning of the original text corresponding to the ROM diagram. Once the semantic meaning of the design documents through their corresponding ROM diagram is captured, a set of mapping rules from the ROM diagram criteria to the modeling language elements is proposed. After that, a set of generation rules to explore the relationship between these elements is proposed to generate UML diagrams and FBS models based on a ROM diagram. A software prototype R2U is presented as a proof of concept for transforming ROM diagrams to UML diagrams. Another software prototype R2FBS is also presented as a proof of concept for transforming ROM diagrams to FBS models. Several case studies show that the proposed approach is feasible. The proposed approach can be applied to requirements modeling in various engineering fields such as software engineering, automotive engineering, and aerospace engineering. Future work is indicated at the end of the present thesi

Environment-Based Design (EBD) Approach to Formalize Product-Service Systems (PSS) Design Process

In the past decade, Product-Service Systems (PSS) have been adopted by companies as a business model that can fulfill customers’ needs better, enhance market competitiveness and achieve sustainability. PSS integrates tangible product and intangible service in different ratio, which makes its design process complicated. However, in the design discipline, there has not been enough discussion for the methodological implications of PSS design, even though design components play a critical role in the development of PSS. In this thesis, a systematic approach — Environment Based Design (EBD) methodology is applied to formalize the PSS design process, focuses on analyzing the environment components and their relationships. The comparison between EBD and the conventional PSS design methodologies are conducted. A PSS life cycle model generated according to the EBD analysis is proposed in order to help designers respond quickly to changes from the environment along the whole life cycle. The benefits resulted from EBD based PSS design process are discovered. A case study of elevator PSS design reveals the effectiveness, efficiency and the benefits of EBD methodology