A general example model for automotive suppliers of the development process and its related information

Abstract

This paper describes preliminary results of a doctoral research project that aims to determine which information — created and/or used by industrial design engineering — should be available, and where and when and how, in order to enable the management of the information and to improve the product and process development process by adjusting it to the information requirements. The structure for the representation of engineering and product information together with the product and process development process and its actors is given by a metamodel which consists of three objects and eight diagrams. The three objects — Activity, Information and Subject — form a three-dimensional model of a company and contain the information to generate automatically the majority of the (two-dimensional) diagrams. These diagrams offer insight into and an overview of the relationships between information, design processes (activities) and subjects (company's organization). A software tool was developed to ease and accelerate the use of the metamodel. Subsequently, three automotive suppliers were analyzed and compared by using the tool in which the metamodel is incorporated. This resulted in the construction of a more general example model of product and engineering data and the activities within a development process. Both the metamodel and the tool are described in this paper. Further, the distinction between product data and engineering data is explained, this is based on four types of data within the information part of the metamodel. Finally, a more general example model of engineering and product information and its associated development process activities is presented.