A NETWORK-BASED APPROACH TO INTEGRATED ENTERPRISE CONCURRENT ENGINEERING

Abstract

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is concerned with improving the product development process by considering the early stages of product design, and of the disparate factors associated with the life cycle of the product. Much of the research done so far in CE is focused on the internal operations of an enterprise. However, early participation of suppliers and customers in CE is generally considered to be of significant benefit. While this may be of considerable advantage, there still remains the need for a methodology for modeling the integrated enterprise CE process, connecting suppliers, manufacturers and customers as a seamless network. Such a methodology for modeling the integrated enterprise CE process will give insights on how to improve the system performance. What is giving added urgency to the need for such a methodology are the recent developments in communications, primarily based on Internet technologies, that readily allows for the linking of information systems between organizations. This paper aims to address this need for a methodology by proposing an approach, called Trans-Nets, that allows for an abstraction of information, removing many of the complexities, while retaining the ability to analyze the more important characteristics of the system. In this paper, the basis of Trans-Nets, including the definitions and operations, is described. Then, an example is presented to illustrate how Trans-Nets can be applied to integrated enterprise modeling of the CE process, to identify system bottlenecks and to investigate possible improvements. A test bed system is then described that implements the principles of Trans-Nets. Overall, the Trans-Nets approach offers three main advantages. First, multiple perspectives can be modeled at earlier design stages without undue complexity. Second, an approach that allows users to examine the interaction between different considerations so that important attributes such as costs and lead times can be readily calculated and bottleneck areas identified. Third, it applies a mathematical formalism to the problem, with the potential of being relatively straightforward to computerize.