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

Collaborative Engine for Distributed Mechanical Design

Effective collaboration is essential for engineers at geographically dispersed locations to accomplish good design with less iteration. Over the last several years, more and more efforts have been put into such research as many industries have distributed their product development to locations with knowledge force. This paper presents a collaborative engine to facilitate collaborations among distributed mechanical designs. Using component-based software technology, collaboration functionality is developed into a set of groupware that makes the collaborative engine applicable to develop new collaborative applications or integrate legacy applications into collaborative environments. An XML-based information representation is developed to streamline the information transmission within the distributed environment. A case study is carried out to show how this engine facilitates designers to collaboratively create a 3D solid model of a same part in real time.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

DETC2005-84617 PRODUCT STRUCTURE MODELLING FOR THE MADE-TO-ORDER ENVIRONMENT

ABSTRACT Product structure is the key information widely used by various business activities performed at different departments and different stages. In the made-to-order environment, product structure representation becomes more complicated because each product can have many variants with slightly different constitutions to fulfill different customer requirements. In such a context, product structure management comes to two interrelated functions: family structure management and variant structure management. At the same time, these two functions need to be seamlessly integrated to ensure the consistency of a family structure and its variant structure. From the business process perspective, throughout the entire product lifecycle, different business activities look at product structure with different purposes. Some activities are carried out based on variants and deem individual variants as different products and some need to be performed based on an entire family. As such, it is imperative to develop a product structure model that is capable of flexibly representing product families and product variants to serve up different processes in a product lifecycle. In this paper, a product structure model based on a master-variant pattern is proposed. The model can explicitly represent common characteristics of a family and particular characteristics of individual variants. Moreover, the variant structure representation is built on the top of the family structure representation. As a result, it provides an effective means to synchronize two types of structures. It also makes product family and variant concepts transparent to various business processes so that effective support can be provided to processes integration in the made-to-order environment

Semantic modeling method for configurable enterprise information systems

Business practices vary from one company to another and business practices often need to be changed due to changes of business environments. To satisfy different business practices, enterprise systems need to be customized. To keep up with ongoing business practice changes, enterprise systems need to be adapted. Because of rigidity and complexity, the customization and adaption of enterprise systems often takes excessive time with potential failures and budget shortfall. Moreover, enterprise systems often drag business behind because they cannot be rapidly adapted to support business practice changes. Extensive literature has addressed this issue by identifying success or failure factors, implementation approaches, and project management strategies. Those efforts were aimed at learning lessons from post implementation experiences to help future projects. This research looks into this issue from a different angle. It attempts to address this issue by delivering a systematic method for developing flexible enterprise systems which can be easily tailored for different business practices or rapidly adapted when business practices change. First, this research examines the role of system models in the context of enterprise system development; and the relationship of system models with software programs in the contexts of computer aided software engineering (CASE), model driven architecture (MDA) and workflow management system (WfMS). Then, by applying the analogical reasoning method, this research initiates a concept of model driven enterprise systems. The novelty of model driven enterprise systems is that it extracts system models from software programs and makes system models able to stay independent of software programs. In the paradigm of model driven enterprise systems, system models act as instructors to guide and control the behavior of software programs. Software programs function by interpreting instructions in system models. This mechanism exposes the opportunity to tailor such a system by changing system models. To make this true, system models should be represented in a language which can be easily understood by human beings and can also be effectively interpreted by computers. In this research, various semantic representations are investigated to support model driven enterprise systems. The significance of this research is 1) the transplantation of the successful structure for flexibility in modern machines and WfMS to enterprise systems; and 2) the advancement of MDA by extending the role of system models from guiding system development to controlling system behaviors. This research contributes to the area relevant to enterprise systems from three perspectives: 1) a new paradigm of enterprise systems, in which enterprise systems consist of two essential elements: system models and software programs. These two elements are loosely coupled and can exist independently; 2) semantic representations, which can effectively represent business entities, entity relationships, business logic and information processing logic in a semantic manner. Semantic representations are the key enabling techniques of model driven enterprise systems; and 3) a brand new role of system models; traditionally the role of system models is to guide developers to write system source code. This research promotes the role of system models to control the behaviors of enterprise

Semantic Representations for Configurable Enterprise Systems

Due to the variation of business practices from one company to another and the lack of flexibility to support different business practices, enterprise systems need to be customized based on the requirements of individual companies. Customization is one the major activities in the enterprise system implementation. It is mainly a process of redesigning and redeveloping functions of an enterprise information system for a particular company. The extra time required for customization definitely stretches the deployment cycle and increases the implementation cost. It is also a barrier that hampers companies to change their business practices for new business opportunities. Therefore, technologies for developing configurable enterprise systems with flexibility to adapt to business practices in different companies are gaining the attention of solution vendors and researchers. In this research, semantic representations were developed for configurable enterprise systems. These representations can enhance the flexibility of enterprise systems and make enterprise systems able to be rapidly tailored for different companies. The core of the concept is to decouple various logics from systems and represent the logics in a semantic manner. To achieve semantic representations, XML-based declarative language has been developed for representing a diversity of logics. The paper elaborates semantic representations of information entities, entity relationships, functional components and graphical environments. A business process management system based on the semantic representations is also briefly presented

Modeling of an Integrated Process Planning System

The various computer-aided systems in many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) work independently at present. This leads to broken information flows and fragmentized business processes, which are the main obstacles to the improvement of business performance. Application integration promotes information sharing, streamlines business processes, and motivates internal collaboration. Moreover, the integration of standalone applications can make use of existing resources and minimize impacts on the current business practices. Therefore, it is an economical approach for SMEs to integrate standalone applications for optimized business performance. This paper presents the modeling of an integrated process planning system, which is intended to assist SMEs to achieve concurrent engineering in design, process planning and manufacturing. Firstly, the integrated system architecture is proposed by addressing the generality and reusability of functional components and collaboration support. Then, a concurrent integration model, which enables different people with different disciplines to work collaboratively, is detailed to tackle the issues of heterogeneous integration and information consistency. Finally, a process planning framework is presented, and manufacturing resource model, part information model and rulebased inference model are elaborated. The development of a prototype system is also briefly presented

Product Structure Modelling for the Made-to-Order Environment

Product structure is the key information widely used by various business activities performed at different departments and different times. In the made-to-order environment, product structure representation becomes more complicated because each product can have many variants with slightly different constitutions to fulfill different customer requirements. In such a context, product structure management comes to two interrelated functions: family structure management and variant structure management. At the same time, these two functions need to be seamlessly integrated to ensure the consistency of a family structure and its variant structure. From the business process perspective, throughout the entire product lifecycle, different business activities look at product structure with different purposes. Some activities are carried out based on variants and deem individual variants as different products and some need to be performed based on an entire family. As such, it is imperative to develop a product structure model that is capable of flexibly representing product families and product variants to serve up different processes. In this paper, a product structure model based on a master-variant pattern is proposed. The model can explicitly represent common characteristics of a family and particular characteristics of individual variants. Moreover, the variant structure representation is built on the top of the family structure representation. As a result, it provides an effective means to synchronize two types of structures. It also makes product family and variant concepts transparent to various business processes so that effective support can be provided to processes integration in the made-to-order environment

A PDM-based Framework for Design to Manufacturing in Mold Making Industry - A Case Study of Business Process Integration

As the product market lifecycle is becoming shorter, molding companies are forced to reduce the time to market. At the same time, the pressure of time-to-market is also conveyed to mold making companies. To rapidly respond to molding companies and retain customers, mold making companies have to improve their overall business performance. At present, mold making companies are faced with an inefficient Information Technology (IT) environment that lacks of integration and is not capable of effectively supporting information sharing and exchange. As a result, the overall business performance can not be improved as expected though the efficiency of individual activities has increased by the corresponding software systems. This paper presents the design and development of a PDM-based system for the integration of critical business processes, including design, planning and production, to enable higher business performance. The PDM system is first extended to manage non-engineering data and support business activities of planning and production. Then, the integration-supported models, including design model, routing planning model and task model, are presented from the perspectives of information association and process automation. The integration of workflow management to streamline business processes is also investigated. Finally, the system implementation is briefly introduced

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

Business Information Modeling for Process Integration in the Mold Making Industry

Driven by industrial needs and enabled by the latest information technology, enterprise integration has rapidly shifted from information integration to process integration for performance excellence in the entire business process. This paper reports on the modeling of a business information model which enables mold making companies to achieve business process integration. The needs of process integration in mold making companies are first highlighted. Typical mold making business processes are analyzed and four critical business processes to be integrated are identified. Further, a process-oriented business information model is proposed, which associates business information entities to meet the needs of all business processes. Based on the model, the integration of four critical business processes is investigated, which enables seamless information flows to streamline the business processes, maximize information sharing across the business processes and achieve the automation and concurrency of the business processes. Finally, the implementation and benefits to industry of the system derived from the developed information model is presented