Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

The manufacturing industry faces many challenges such as reducing time-to-market and cutting costs. In order to meet these increasing demands, effective methods are need to support the early product development stages by bridging the gap of communicating early design ideas and the evaluation of manufacturing performance. This paper introduces methods of linking design and manufacturing domains using disparate technologies. The combined technologies include knowledge management supporting for product lifecycle management (PLM) systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, aggregate process planning systems, workflow management and data exchange formats. A case study has been used to demonstrate the use of these technologies, illustrated by adding manufacturing knowledge to generate alternative early process plan which are in turn used by an ERP system to obtain and optimise a rough-cut capacity plan

Mapping customer needs to engineering characteristics: an aerospace perspective for conceptual design

Designing complex engineering systems, such as an aircraft or an aero-engine, is immensely challenging. Formal Systems Engineering (SE) practices are widely used in the aerospace industry throughout the overall design process to minimise the overall design effort, corrective re-work, and ultimately overall development and manufacturing costs. Incorporating the needs and requirements from customers and other stakeholders into the conceptual and early design process is vital for the success and viability of any development programme. This paper presents a formal methodology, the Value-Driven Design (VDD) methodology that has been developed for collaborative and iterative use in the Extended Enterprise (EE) within the aerospace industry, and that has been applied using the Concept Design Analysis (CODA) method to map captured Customer Needs (CNs) into Engineering Characteristics (ECs) and to model an overall ‘design merit’ metric to be used in design assessments, sensitivity analyses, and engineering design optimisation studies. Two different case studies with increasing complexity are presented to elucidate the application areas of the CODA method in the context of the VDD methodology for the EE within the aerospace secto

An extensible manufacturing resource model for process integration

Driven by industrial needs and enabled by process technology and information technology, enterprise integration is rapidly shifting from information integration to process integration to improve overall performance of enterprises. Traditional resource models are established based on the needs of individual applications. They cannot effectively serve process integration which needs resources to be represented in a unified, comprehensive and flexible way to meet the needs of various applications for different business processes. This paper looks into this issue and presents a configurable and extensible resource model which can be rapidly reconfigured and extended to serve for different applications. To achieve generality, the presented resource model is established from macro level and micro level. A semantic representation method is developed to improve the flexibility and extensibility of the model

Analysis of manufacturing operations using knowledge- Enriched aggregate process planning

Knowledge-Enriched Aggregate Process Planning is concerned with the problem of supporting agile design and manufacture by making process planning feedback integral to the design function. A novel Digital Enterprise Technology framework (Maropoulos 2003) provides the technical context and is the basis for the integration of the methods with existing technologies for enterprise-wide product development. The work is based upon the assertion that, to assure success when developing new products, the technical and qualitative evaluation of process plans must be carried out as early as possible. An intelligent exploration methodology is presented for the technical evaluation of the many alternative manufacturing options which are feasible during the conceptual and embodiment design phases. 'Data resistant' aggregate product, process and resource models are the foundation of these planning methods. From the low-level attributes of these models, aggregate methods to generate suitable alternative process plans and estimate Quality, Cost and Delivery (QCD) have been created. The reliance on QCD metrics in process planning neglects the importance of tacit knowledge that people use to make everyday decisions and express their professional judgement in design. Hence, the research also advances the core aggregate planning theories by developing knowledge-enrichment methods for measuring and analysing qualitative factors as an additional indicator of manufacturing performance, which can be used to compute the potential of a process plan. The application of these methods allows the designer to make a comparative estimation of manufacturability for design alternatives. Ultimately, this research should translate into significant reductions in both design costs and product development time and create synergy between the product design and the manufacturing system that will be used to make it. The efficacy of the methodology was proved through the development of an experimental computer system (called CAPABLE Space) which used real industrial data, from a leading UK satellite manufacturer to validate the industrial benefits and promote the commercial exploitation of the research

Development of a knowledge-based and collaborative engineering design agent

In order to avoid errors in engineering design that affect the later product life cycle, especially the manufacturing process, an analysis or evaluation has to be performed at the earliest possible stage. As this evaluation is very knowledge-intensive and often this knowledge is not directly available to the engineer, this paper presents an approach for a knowledge-based and collaborative engineering design agent. The technology based on multi-agent systems enables problem-solving support by an autonomous knowledge-based system which has its own beliefs, goals, and intentions. The presented approach is embedded in a CAD development environment and validated on an application example from engineering design

Automated Manufacturability Analysis for Conceptual Design in New Product Development

This paper presents ANA, a software package that provides automated manufacturability feedback to product designers, enabling first time quality of design and avoiding later stage change requests. Manufacturing knowledge is critical to the design process. Decisions made early in the conceptual design phase can significantly affect downstream production cost. Manufacturing engineers may have a limited role in the design process which can lead to designs that are difficult to manufacture. ANA is the implementation of numerous feature-free geometric algorithms that determine manufacturability metrics related to machining, casting, die-casting, and welding processes. These metrics are accompanied by colored 3D graphical models to provide rich feedback similar to finite element models, for example. The iterations of a design are tracked over time, allowing users to review how certain design decisions impact the expected manufacturability of the part. ANA is intended for use inside existing CAD systems, in the cloud, or as a standalone application. The feedback from ANA, combined with built-in learning modules, aids the user in making design improvements and assists in selecting an appropriate manufacturing process. This feedback can be shared across platforms via interactive 3D PDFs

Evaluation of Designer Feedback Systems in Design for Manufacturability

The research study introduces a new designer feedback tool called Three Dimensional Integrated Feedback (3DIF) tool to convey manufacturability analysis results early in the conceptual design phase. The study evaluates and compares different modalities of manufacturability feedback given to de-sign engineers. The conceptual design stage is critical in deter-mining the feasibility of the whole production process. Providing designers with early suggestions and feedback about the manu-facturability of product designs will help to improve their design and save time and cost to manufacture. Feedback given to the design engineers could be in any form text, 2D markups, 3D data or verbal. Feedback can contain insufficient data or can be diffi-cult to interpret leading to frequent design iterations and in-crease in lead time. It is important that feedback should be able to convey necessary design information and should be in lan-guage understandable by design engineers. The modality of feed-back affects interpretability of the data presented. The study compares between no feedback, text-based feedback, 2D feed-back and 3D feedback modalities in the casting process of manu-facturing. The results expected from the study will help us to determine the appropriate modality of feedback that improves design performance of both expert and novice designers

Improving the Availability of Manufacturability Information through Decentralization of Process Planning

Process planning is part of the general product development and production process that usually follows design and precedes manufacturing. Manufacturability and process planning information in general play central role in many product development and production activities, including paradoxically, conceptual and detail design - the activities that take place before process planning. The need of conducting some of the process planning activities formally before or during design is thus rather obvious. One of the main research issues is therefore the identification of the process planning activities that can be performed before the traditional process planning phase and handling of the process planning information so as to adequately provide the designers with the manufacturability informationneeded during conceptual and detail design. Another issue is how to support collaboration during process planning and how to maintain continuity of the process planning tasks. This paper suggests the decentralization of the process planning task and proposes the execution of the process planning activities in a piecemeal fashion, starting right afterreceiving an order and specifying the requirements for a product. Process planning under the proposed procedure consists of six semi-autonomous sub-phases, some of which comprise activities that must be conducted prior to the process planning phase. This helps to overcome the problem of timely availability of manufacturability information during the execution of upstream and downstream product development and production activities. The paper alsoproposes a computer-based method of handling the manufacturability information generated in various stages of the product development and production process. A database design and structure of prototype software that manages the process planning information are presented and discussed. Furthermore, a case study conducted to explore howthe proposed process planning procedure could be put in use is presented and discussed

Feasibility Evaluation of Milling Designs Using Multi-Agent Systems

During product development, many decisions have to be made that affect the entire product life cycle and often lead to errors that cause additional effort. To proactively support the engineer in evaluating his design in a CAD program, in this paper an approach to evaluate milling designs using a multi-agent system (MAS) is presented. The CommonKADS method is used and the MAS is validated against an application example of a gearbox housing that has been checked for design guidelines, standards, and tool or machine portfolios

The sustainable co-design of products and production systems

The challenges in designing products and production systems are becoming increasingly complex due to more changeable customer demands, frequent product updates, and the requirements for resource efficiency. Established design processes are often unable to readily accommodate these rapid changes. In addition, incremental benefits are often achieved through existing sustainable design approaches due to inability to fully assess the impacts of product design improvements and their associated implications within production facilities. This highlights the need for more integrated design processes that enable seamless co-development of products and production systems. This paper examines the current interrelation and interaction of these design processes from the resource efficiency viewpoint, proposes a novel sustainable ‘Co-Design’ model, and discusses the ecological benefits of co-designing future products and production systems