Information modeling for variation management during the product and manufacturing process design

Abstract

For car and aircraft industries, Design for Manufacturing, Robust Design and Conceptual Process Planning are a key activity to evaluate manufacturability, to improve design in the product development stage. Moreover, the inherent imperfections of manufacturing processes and resources (Manufacturing Process Key Characteristics, MPKCs) involve a degradation of functional part or product characteristics (Part / Product Key Characteristics, PKCs). The management of Key Characteristics (KCs) has become an important issue in product and process design and concurrent engineering. In order to ensure a certain level of quality, to assess the manufacturability, to select resources and to improve design, it is important to know the causality between MPKCs and PKCs. Effective reuse of enterprise knowledge about causality is a key strategic component of integrated product and processes development. The goal here is to put the management of KCs in a concurrent engineering context. There is an important question that would need to be looked upon: How to formalize and to capitalize the causality between MPKCs and PKCs? Therefore, to formalize and to capitalize this causality, we describe an information model.