Coupling system design and project planning: discussion on a bijective link between system and project structures

This article discuss the architecture of an integrated model able to support the coupling between a system design process and a project planning process. The project planning process is in charge of defining, planning and controlling the system design project. A benchmarking analysis carried out with fifteen companies belonging to the world competitiveness cluster, Aerospace Valley, has highlighted a lack of models, processes and tools for aiding the interactions between the two environments. We define the coupling as the establishment of links between entities of the two domains while preserving their original semantic, thus allowing information to be collected. The proposed coupling is recursive. It enables systems to be decomposed into subsystems when designers consider complexity to be too high, and can also decompose projects into sub-projects. The coupling enables systematically links to be drawn between project entities and system entities. In this paper, we discuss the different possibilities of linking system and project structures during the design and the planning processes. Firstly, after presenting the results of the industrial analysis, the different entities are defined and the various coupling modes are discussed

Generic bill of functions, materials, and operations for SAP2 configuration

International audienceMost available studies on configuration focus on either sales configuration specifying functional features or production configuration addressing product components. It has been well recognised that automating most of the activities associated with specification, engineering, and process planning of customised products and their interactions is one key in achieving product customisation. Thus, treating sales configuration and product configuration separately may not contribute to product customisation from a systematic view although they may lead to the improvement of individual stages. Recognising this limitation of existing studies, in this paper, we propose integrated SAles, Product and Production (SAP2) configuration, which helps achieve product customisation from a holistic view. Its rationale lies in automating consistently sales, product and production configuration activities in one system. In view of the importance of configuration models, we focus on the model underpinning SAP2 configuration called generic bill of functions, materials and operations (GBoFMO) and discuss it in detail. As the core of SAP2 configuration, GBoFMO can provide companies with an insight into organising the large volumes of data and knowledge in the life cycle of product family development. We also report a case study of light passenger aircrafts to illustrate the GBoFMO

Proceedings of the 21th International Configuration Workshop

International audienc

Mass customization, configuration and manufacturing

International audienceMass customization has become a main issue for many companies fighting on a world market. In order to define the customized product that fit each customer need, these companies use configuration software called configurators. Most of these configurators, mainly based on artificial intelligence techniques, are just interested in the product definition without addressing relevant manufacturing problems. The goal of this communication is to show that the same kinds of computer techniques can be used to define customized assembly operations and manufacturing routings

An optimization model for selecting a product family and designing its supply chain

International audienceWhen designing a new family of products, designers and manufacturers must define the product family and its supply chain simultaneously. At the very first step of the design process, designers propose various solutions for the set of variants of a product family and their bill-of-materials. The second step is to select some of these variants while choosing the architecture of the supply chain. A mixed integer linear programming model is investigated that optimizes the operating cost of the resulting supply chain while choosing the product variants. This work is applied to the problem of an automotive supplier

Improvement of retrieval in Case-Based Reasoning for system design

The problematic addressed in this article is dealing with the improvement of retrieval in Case-Based Reasoning for system design. The retrieval activity is based on the evaluation of similarities between requirements (target) and the solutions (sources). However, similarities between features is often a subjective kind of knowledge difficult to formalize within companies. Based on an ontology of domain, the approach permits to retrieve compatible solutions rather than similar ones using a model of designer preferences. The requirements are modeled by means of constraints. When constraints are confronted to solutions in order to evaluate a compatibility measure, missing information within solutions with regard to requirements are taken into account using semantic similarities between concepts. A case study validates the proposals

How to take into account general and contextual knowledge for interactive aiding design: Towards the coupling of CSP and CBR approaches

The goal of this paper is to show how it is possible to support design decisions with two different tools relying on two kinds of knowledge: case-based reasoning operating with contextual knowledge embodied in past cases and constraint filtering that operates with general knowledge formalized using constraints. Our goals are, firstly to make an overview of existing works that analyses the various ways to associate these two kinds of aiding tools essentially in a sequential way. Secondly, we propose an approach that allows us to use them simultaneously in order to assist design decisions with these two kinds of knowledge. The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, we define the goal of the paper and recall the background of case-based reasoning and constraint filtering. In the second section, the industrial problem which led us to consider these two kinds of knowledge is presented. In the third section, an overview of the various possibilities of using these two aiding decision tools in a sequential way is drawn up. In the fourth section, we propose an approach that allows us to use both aiding decision tools in a simultaneous and iterative way according to the availability of knowledge. An example dealing with helicopter maintenance illustrates our proposals

Representative Benchmark for Concurrent Product and Process Configuration Problem: Definitions and Some Problem Instances

International audienceThis paper considers the Optimization of Concurrent Product and Process Configuration problems (O-CPPC) that satisfy various number of criteria, which rely on the customer’s requirements and the objectives of the company. Various works have proposed evolutionary optimization algorithms dedicated to this concurrent configuration problem with generic model propositions due to this paper is relevant to the evaluation of these optimization algorithms. The aim of this paper is to define a set of instances of the generic model that represent a large family of problems. First, a background of the Optimization of Concurrent Product and Process Configuration problems is introduced. Next, some basic definitions of an O-CPPC generic model are analyzed. Then, the main general parameters to define an instance are presented (Product Structure, Process Structure, Model Size and Model Constraint Density) in order to propose some general evaluation tests. And finally, to be consistent with the previous works, some basic cases are described to show how to deal with this kind of problem in an organized way

Mass customization and configuration: requirement analysis and constraint based modelling propositions

International audienceThe purpose of this paper is, on the one hand, to identify to define and classify customization requirements and, on the other hand, to evaluate how generic modeling and configuration assistance within the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) framework can fulfil the requirements. The aim is to provide commercial configurator knowledge base designers with constraint based generic modeling elements for customizable industrial product. A first part recalls the main trends of the configuration problem. In a second part divided in four sections corresponding with different requirement set; each section proposes a definition of the requirement set, some CSP based modeling elements and a discussion about adequacy of relevant configuration assistance techniques

Aiding design with constraints: an extension of quad trees in order to deal with piecewise functions

Issu de : IESM'05 - International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Systems Management, Marrakech, MOROCCO, May 16-19, 2005International audienceThis paper deals with aiding preliminary design when considered as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). In this case, constraint filtering techniques provide some kind of interactive assistance to the designer. However, some kinds of numerical constraints corresponding with numerical relations cannot be filtered precisely with classical analytical filtering techniques such as interval arithmetic or box-consistency; it is therefore necessary to discretize them in order to include them in the CSP. To this end, quad trees (QT) have been proposed for binary constraints, or 2k trees when more than two variables are considered; but QT assume that a constraint must be defined by a single numerical function. The aim of this paper is to show that QT techniques can be extended when a constraint is defined by a piecewise function or by a set of numerical functions defined on intervals. The first section recalls some basics relevant to the preliminary design problem and the interests of the CSP assistance. The second section presents the principles of the QT. The last section describes our contributions relevant to QT extensions dealing with piecewise functions