Shifting the human dialogue to knowledge level at modeling of products

Abstract

Engineering for lifecycle of products integrates all required definitions, descriptions, and simulations in contextual model spaces. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is flexible virtual technology to serve this new way of product engineering in company environments. Presently, communication between engineer and PLM modeling environment is done using product object generation processes where human defines features as objects. The well known and proven feature principle has been extended to the entire product model. It was first defined in the ISO10303 product model standard. A PLM system is open for extension by new features, procedures, and human communication surfaces in application environment opening the way also for research. As a contribution to research in open PLM environments, this paper introduces a novel knowledge based and product behavior driven human control of product object definition. Recent product modeling in PLM system handles contextual features including knowledge entities such as rule sets, etc. An actual problem in industrial engineering environments is that model of complex product includes huge number of feature and context definitions making communication of human with object generation very difficult. Contributing to a possible solution, this paper introduces an approach and method to replace the currently applied direct human control of product model object generation processes by a new objective and knowledge driven adaptive control. For this reason, the currently applied product model is proposed to extend by a new contextual chain including human request, product definition objective, product behavior, product object generation control, and product object model representation. The main essence of the proposed modeling is situation based product behavior feature driven definition of product objects as features. Situation connects specified product quality, knowledge for feature definition, and product features for requested product functions.