Concurrent Product Design and Manufacturing

Abstract

This chapter describes the difficulties in concurrent product design and manufacturing. It explains the foregoing methodologies and practical procedures for solving the difficulties. Concurrent engineering represents an ideal configurational system for actual product design and manufacturing. This has advantages over the usual sequential systems in use. In industrial companies, each work activity of product planning, research and development, product design, manufacturing and marketing is performed in the corresponding division. When company scale is large, communication among the divisions is not smooth. Such inefficient communication may create obstacles for producing products with a higher product performance and a lower product manufacturing cost. In the product design, configurations or shapes of products are determined under the evaluative criterion of the product performance. On the other hand, in the process design for manufacturing, methods for realizing the designed shapes are determined under the criterion of the manufacturing cost. The chapter describes the advantages and difficulties of concurrent decision making.