NFF Special Session – Potentials of Applying Methods, Tools, Processes and Knowledge from Testing in Product Development to the NFF Problem

AbstractWhile verification is an important and expensive task in the development of airborne systems, insights gained into the system under test are still very much treated in an isolated way. This means that the knowledge established in the testing of airborne systems in product development is currently not applied to e.g. repair or maintenance processes. This raises the question, whether the methods, tools and processes as well as the knowledge which is generated during testing are exploitable in the following life cycle phases, especially for service and maintenance processes? This paper presents a vision and investigates the potentials of how the methods, tools, processes and knowledge used during the verification phase in the beginning of life of an airborne system could be utilized in later lifecycle phases. A special emphasis is placed on how they can be applied to improve repair and maintenance activities in the context of NFF (No Failure or No Fault Found) cases (and vice versa). It can be expected that the methods, tools, processes and knowledge could be valuable for reducing ground times of aircraft, minimizing repair costs, reducing efforts for failure analysis considerably and improving aircraft safety

Towards Product Avatars Representing Middle-of-Life Information for Improving Design, Development and Manufacturing Processes

Part 2: Digital Product- and Process- DevelopmentInternational audienceIn today’s globalized world, customers increasingly expect physical products and related information of the highest quality. New developments bring the entire product lifecycle into focus. Accordingly, an emphasis must be placed upon the need to actively manage and share product lifecycle information. The so-called Product Avatar represents an interesting approach to administrate the communication between intelligent products and their stakeholders along the product lifecycle. After its initial introduction as a technical concept, the product avatar now revolves around the idea individualized digital counterparts as targeted digital representations of products enabling stakeholders to benefit from value-added services built on product lifecycle information generated and shared by Intelligent Products. In this paper, first the concept of using a Product Avatar representation of product lifecycle information to improve the first phases, namely design, development and manufacturing will be elaborated on. This will be followed by a real life example of a leisure boat manufacturer incorporating these principles to make the theoretical concept more feasible

Improving Reverse Logistics Processes Using Item-level Product Lifecycle Management

Abstract: Sustainability is a key issue for companies offering products and services on the global market. The ever-increasing worldwide demand for raw materials in combination with the rising costs for materials and energy challenges companies to make their products, processes and services more sustainable. More and more customers are demanding sustainable products and services due to their increased awareness about environmental protection. By providing access to data, information and knowledge about products and services the concept of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) can be applied to reverse logistics processes to improve sustainability. The term PLM and therefore the functionality of existing PLM systems must be considered as quite different. The paper introduces the concept of item-level Product Lifecycle Management. It investigates the requirements that item-level PLM systems must fulfill in order to support sustainability in reverse logistics processes in an appropriate manner. Existing item-level PLM solutions are then investigated according their suitability in the field of reverse logistics. Keywords: Item-Level Product Lifecycle Management, architecture, integration, item-level, sustainability, reverse logistic

Information Quality in PLM: A Product Design Perspective

Part 4: Project Management, Engineering Management, and Quality ManagementInternational audienceRecent approaches for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) aim for the efficient utilization of the available product information. A reason for this is that the amount of information is growing, due to the increasing complexity of products, and concurrent, collaborative processes along the lifecycle. Additional information flows are continuously explored by industry and academia – a recent example is the backflow of information from the usage phase. The large amount of information that has to be handled by companies nowadays and even more in the future, makes it important to separate “fitting” from “unfitting” information. A way to distinguish both is to explore the characteristics of the information, in order to find those information that are “fit for purpose” (information quality). Since the amount of information is so large and the processes along the lifecycle are diverse in terms of their expectations about the information, the problem is similar to finding a needle in a hay stack.This paper is one of two papers aiming to address this problem by giving examples why information quality matters in PLM. It focuses on one particular lifecycle process, in this case product design. An existing approach, describing information quality by 15 dimensions, is applied to the selected design process

Improving Product-Service Systems by Exploiting Information From The Usage Phase. A Case Study

AbstractNowadays the relevance of Product-Service-Systems (PSS) is increasing. Providing customers with products and supporting services suiting the customer expectations becomes a key-factor for being successful in the market. Contemporarily, a huge amount of data such as usage-data from sensors or Product Embedded Information Devices as well as customer feedback from social media, forums or blogs is already available for manufacturers of PSS. These data sources provide valuable knowledge about the customer's usage of products and their expectations and complaints.The successful exploitation of PUI - Product Usage Information (such as sensor data or user feedback) becomes a key success factor for future product developments as they aid the development of PSS directly deriving from costumer requirements. But an efficient use of such knowledge requires the setup of PUI related analysis, filters and the identification of dependencies between PUI and design parameters or component attributes. Thus, transferring the usage information to design requirements is currently the major challenge in the process of developing successful PSS.Currently, there is a lack of research for a systematic transfer of PUI into product design requirements. A basic pre-condition for a knowledge transfer is a formal and neutral representation of both sides, usage data on the one hand and design parameters on the other. An approach for such a neutral representation is KbeML, which is specified as a formal extension of the established SysML standard, enabling a linkage of PUI and formalized KBE models.This paper provides a case study regarding the connection of PUI and KBE models in the branch of White Goods. The information gathered from sensors embedded in washing machines will be considered in order to retrieve improved design requirements for next generation washing machines. In a first step the product structure of a washing machine will be represented in a formal and neutral manner by using KbeML. This way the washing machine is formally described in terms of an assembly structure, and broken down into subsystems and eventually individual parts, which are defined by their relevant core parameters.In addition, the derived sensor data will be formalized as a SysML extension. The linkage between both sides (product structure data and PUI) can be achieved by mapping design parameters directly to parameters and values provided by sensors. To enable an analysis of these parameters the modelling language will provide statistical elements (e.g. median) allowing the extraction of critical values (information) from data streams.This way a comprehensive modelling environment can be provided to corresponding stakeholders, supporting an effective and efficient application of usage data for the development of new or the improvement of existing PSS