Accelerating the adoption of Industry 4.0 supporting technologies in manufacturing engineering courses

[EN] Universities are one of the fundamental actors to guarantee the dissemination of knowledge and the development of competences related to the Industry of the Future (IoF) or Industry 4.0. Computer Aided (CAX) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technologies are key part in the IoF. With this aim, it was launch a project focused on Manufacturing and partially funded by La Fondation Dassault Systèmes. This communication presents a review on CAX-PLM training, four initiatives already in place in universities participating in the project, the project scope, the approach to integrate with the industrial context, the working method to consider different competence profiles and the development framework.The authors express their gratitude to the other project colleagues and to La Fondation Dassault Systèmes for its funding support.Ríos, J.; Mas, F.; Marcos, M.; Vila, C.; Ugarte, D.; Chevrot, T. (2017). Accelerating the adoption of Industry 4.0 supporting technologies in manufacturing engineering courses. MATERIALS SCIENCE FORUM. 903:100-111. https://doi.org/10.4028/www.scientific.net/MSF.903.100S10011190

Social tagging as a knowledge collecting strategy in the engineering design change process

This article focuses on analysing the feasibility of using social tagging as a tool for knowledge collection and retrieval in the context of the product development process (PDP). This process is a social activity that involves groups of individuals who share a common goal: to design a product . Traditional knowledge-based systems (KBS) are not very well suited to capture the tacit knowledge that is embedded in this process. Social tagging is proposed in this article as the mechanism to externalize the tacit knowledge about the best CAD modelling strategies between the design team members. This knowledge is especially relevant for the management of engineering change orders because this process is closely related to the modelling methodology used to create the three-dimensional (3D) CAD models that have to be adapted to accomplish a specific design modification. In order to analyse the feasibility of this approach, an experimental study was conducted to understand the tagging process in this context and the benefit of using this information in the modification procedure of 3D CAD models. Preliminary experimental results show that tagging represents a feasible approach to support knowledge collection on best CAD modelling practices.Alduchin-Quintero, G.; Contero, M. (2012). Social tagging as a knowledge collecting strategy in the engineering design change process. Art, Design and Communication in Higher Education. 10(2):147-162. doi:10.1386/adch.10.2.147_114716210

Proposition d’un cadre méthodologique comme support aux approches d’écoconception en entreprise : exigences et conceptualisation pour une plateforme logicielle

Today the consideration of environmental issues is essential in relation to companies' sustainability policy. The literature review reveals that ecodesign is not an easy viewpoint to integrate due to its specificities. Despite the great number of existing tools and methods, companies still encounter difficulties for implementing ecodesign in their design process.This research work aims at providing a combined solution including a methodology supported by a software platform. The methodology guides the design team through a series of steps to realize in the design process. And, to manage ecodesign activities, we defined the structure of a software platform gathering the necessary tools for the design team: tools for the design of the product life cycle, an assessment tool for the cost and the environmental impacts, a guidance tool based on ecodesign rules and case studies, a monitoring tool for the project indicators, and databases in relation with the model of the product and its life cycle.The results of two industrial experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposition. However, a limit of the platform has been identified during the second case study. A third experiment has therefore been realised during a workshop in an international conference to tackle this point.La prise en compte des enjeux environnementaux est aujourd'hui un point essentiel dans la stratégie de développement durable des entreprises. La revue de la littérature montre que l'écoconception n'est pas simple à intégrer du fait de ses spécificités. Malgré le nombre important d'outils et de méthodes existantes, les entreprises rencontrent encore souvent des difficultés à intégrer l'écoconception dans leur processus de conception.Ces recherches proposent donc une solution couplant une méthodologie et une plateforme logicielle. La méthodologie guide l'équipe de conception à travers une série d'étapes à réaliser dans le processus de conception. Et pour gérer les activités d'écoconception, nous avons défini la structure d'une plateforme logicielle rassemblant les outils nécessaires à l'équipe de conception : des outils pour la conception du cycle de vie du produit, un outil d'évaluation des impacts coût et environnement, un outil d'aide à base de règles de conception et d'études de cas, un outil de suivi des indicateurs projet et des bases de données en relation avec le modèle produit et son cycle de vie.Les résultats de deux expérimentations industrielles démontrent la validité de notre proposition. Cependant, une limite de la plateforme a été identifiée lors du second cas d'étude. Une troisième expérimentation a donc été réalisée lors d'un atelier pendant une conférence internationale pour solutionner ce point

Integrated Project Support Study Group : findings

The challenges of the LHC project have lead CERN to produce a comprehensive set of project management tools covering engineering data management, project scheduling and costing, event management and document management. Each of these tools represents a significant and world-recognised advance in their respective domains. Reviewing the offering on the eve of LHC commissioning one can identify three major challenges: 1. How to integrate the tools to provide a uniform and integrated full-product lifecycle solution 2. How to evolve the functionality in certain areas to address weaknesses identified with our experience in constructing the LHC and integrate emerging industry best practices 3. How to coherently package the offering not just for future projects in CERN, but moreover in the context of providing a centre of excellence for worldwide collaboration in future HEP projects

Implementation of an Object-Oriented Life Cycle Assessment Framework Using Functional Analysis and Systems Engineering Principles

There has been a growing awareness about the environmental impacts of producing and consuming goods and services. Among the various tools that have been developed to better understand these impacts, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of the most commonly used tools to estimate the environmental effects of products and services. Given that a significant percentage of a product’s impacts are defined during the design and development, it is necessary to effectively integrate LCA into these early phases of the product lifecycle. However, the lack of standardized practices, complex modelling approaches, data and time requirements, special training requirements for designers, and uncertainties in the results make it difficult to apply LCA in the design and development stages. In order to integrate LCA into the design and development stage, it is necessary to systematically generate and compare alternatives, to analyze scenarios, and to evaluate changes for different product structures and architectures so that impacts can be minimized. Functional analysis is a widely-used technique in the conceptual design environment but it has not been effectively used in the LCA domain. In this thesis, functional analysis and systems engineering principles are used to implement an Object-Oriented framework for LCA. The results of the process demonstrate the potential for an easy to update and scalable LCA model that facilitates comparability. Each module in this model can be developed separately and integrated effectively into a larger model. This framework hold promise to better integrate LCA into the design and development phases

A methodology for the distributed and collaborative management of engineering knowledge

The problems of collaborative engineering design and management at the conceptual stage in a large network of dissimilar enterprises was investigated. This issue in engineering design is a result of the supply chain and virtual enterprise (VE) oriented industry that demands faster time to market and accurate cost/manufacturing analysis from conception. Current tools and techniques do not completely fulfil this requirement due to a lack of coherent inter-enterprise collaboration and a dearth of manufacturing knowledge available at the concept stage. Client-server and peer to peer systems were tested for communication, as well as various techniques for knowledge management and propagation including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and expert systems. As a result of system testing, and extensive literature review, several novel techniques were proposed and tested to improve the coherent management of knowledge and enable inter-enterprise collaboration. The techniques were trialled on two engineering project examples. An automotive Tier-1 supplier which designs products whose components are sub­contracted to a large supply chain and assembled for an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) was used as a test scenario. The utility of the systems for integrating large VEs into a coherent project with unified specifications were demonstrated in a simple example, and problems associated with engineering document management overcome via re-usable, configurable, object oriented ontologies propagated throughout the VE imposing a coherent nomenclature and engineering product definition. All knowledge within the system maintains links from specification - concept - design - testing through to manufacturing stages, aiding the participating enterprises in maintaining their knowledge and experience for future projects. This potentially speeds the process of innovation by enabling companies to concentrate on value-added aspects of designs whilst ‘bread-and-butter’ expertise is reused. The second example, a manufacturer of rapid-construction steel bridges, demonstrated the manufacturing dimension of the methodology, where the early stage of design, and the generation of new concepts by reusing existing manufacturing knowledge bases was demonstrated. The solution consisted of a de-centralised super-peer net architecture to establish and maintain communications between enterprises in a VE. The enterprises are able to share knowledge in a common format and nomenclature via the building-block shareable super-ontology that can be tailored on a project by project basis, whilst maintaining the common nomenclature of the ‘super-ontology’ eliminating knowledge interpretation issues. The two-tier architecture developed as part of the solution glues together the peer-peer and super-ontologies to form a coherent system for internal knowledge management and product development as well as external virtual enterprise product development and knowledge management. In conclusion, the methodology developed for collaboration and knowledge management was shown to be more appropriate for use by smaller enterprises collaborating in a large Virtual Enterprise than PLM technology in terms of: usability, configurability, cost of system and individual control over intellectual property rights