Concurrent Engineering Design Research Articles

An Internet-enabled integrated system for co-design and concurrent engineering

In order to facilitate the product design and realisation processes, in this paper, an Internet-enabled system has been developed to support collaborative and concurrent engineering design by seamlessly integrating three functional modules, i.e., co-design, Web-based visualisation and manufacturing analysis, based on some state-of-the-art Java and Web technologies. In the co-design module, designers are equipped with co-modelling and co-modification facilities to carry out a design task collaboratively. The Web-based visualisation module provides a portal for users, who are not involved in the co-modelling process directly, to view and analyse a design part conveniently. Services in the manufacturing analysis module can be invoked by users dynamically to evaluate and optimise the manufacturing costs and the manufacturability of a design part so as to implement the concurrent engineering methodology during a co-design process. This system can be used for a design team geographically distributed to organise a 3D collaborative and concurrent engineering design effectively, and the proposed distributed and integration architectures enable the system to be generic, open and scalable.

An Internet-enabled integrated system for co-design and concurrent engineering

In order to facilitate the product design and realisation processes, in this paper, an Internet-enabled system has been developed to support collaborative and concurrent engineering design by seamlessly integrating three functional modules, i.e., co-design, Web-based visualisation and manufacturing analysis, based on some state-of-the-art Java and Web technologies. In the co-design module, designers are equipped with co-modelling and co-modification facilities to carry out a design task collaboratively. The Web-based visualisation module provides a portal for users, who are not involved in the co-modelling process directly, to view and analyse a design part conveniently. Services in the manufacturing analysis module can be invoked by users dynamically to evaluate and optimise the manufacturing costs and the manufacturability of a design part so as to implement the concurrent engineering methodology during a co-design process. This system can be used for a design team geographically distributed to organise a 3D collaborative and concurrent engineering design effectively, and the proposed distributed and integration architectures enable the system to be generic, open and scalable.

Strategic product design for concurrent engineering

Strategic product design for concurrent engineering

Conflict Cause Identification in Web-Based Concurrent Engineering Design System

Modern engineering design commonly involves the cooperative effort of design experts, who often come from different engineering backgrounds, have different geological locations, and communicate primarily via the web. Conflicts, which commonly exist in the design process, are exacerbated by this situation. This paper first presents a well-organized structure of conflict classes and causes. Based on an analysis of conflict nature and conflict-related human behavior in the concurrent engineering design, a new computational model for autonomously identifying the conflict cause in the web-based concurrent engineering design environment is developed and tested. The Plane World design simulation system is used as a test-bed to demonstrate and verify the conflict cause identification methods developed in this work.

An Agent-Based Decision Network for Concurrent Engineering Design

Engineering design is a complex process. Even in designing a simple product, many decisions must be made by a designer. The problem gets more complex when multiple designers work as a team to design single artifact. In this paper, we take a decision- based approach to model design process and introduce an agent-based decision network (ADN) to support concurrent decision-making and collaboration in design. ADN focuses on making designers consider other team members' decisions when making their own and at tempts to achieve coherent design decisions among designers by explicitly representing and enhancing individual design decision-mak ing and negotiation processes. ADN is composed of a decision-based design process model (DDPM), an objective-based negotiation model (OBNM), and a number of intelligent agents, each associated with a human designer. The DDPM was developed to capture indi vidual designers' design processes. OBNM was developed to facilitate objective-based negotiation and to track both dependencies gen erated and decisions made at each design stage for downstream negotiation support. In ADN, each designer is associated with an agent and both the DDPM and OBNM are captured and facilitated by agents and are not explicitly visible to designers. Agents generate and uti lize the DDPM and OBNM information to support their designers. This paper describes the ADN framework in detail, points out its advan tages, and presents an application example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ADN framework.

An Agent-Based Decision Network for Concurrent Engineering Design

An Agent-Based Decision Network for Concurrent Engineering Design

An Agent-Based Decision Network for Concurrent Engineering Design

An Agent-Based Decision Network for Concurrent Engineering Design

2102 ConCAD (Concurrent Computer-Aided Design) System for Supporting Muti-disciplinary Design Activities from Conceptual Design Stage : Part I : Concept and Related Technologies

This research focuses on the development of an intelligent CAD (ICAD) system called ConCAD for implementing concurrent engineering design. The functional requirements for future ICAD system are reviewed and discussed from literature survey, and a unified system architecture is proposed, and also a new data structure for representing solid model is employed. Here, multi-disciplinary design information is tightly integrated with the data structure.

A concurrent engineering approach to chemical process design

Much confusion still surrounds the concurrent engineering design concept in the chemical engineering world. The conventional hierarchical design method is compared to the concurrent engineering concept, and it is shown that the CE concept particularly improves the way a chemical design engineer deals with “external factors” that influence a process design. A framework is introduced to easily identify and classify these external factors. Through a number of industrial case studies, the current design methods have been analyzed, and improvements are identified. The flexibility of the plant can be improved by using a concurrent approach.

Principles and practices of organizational performance excellence

Quality and TQM fundamentals management and organization change customer satisfaction and focus employee/team empowerment organization planning quality systems and improvement supplier quality management quality costs - old and new tools for continuous improvement benchmarking quality standards and awards quality function deployment concurrent engineering design of experiments.

Design for manufacturing: a dimensioning aspect

Abstract This paper discusses the dimensioning problem in Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Concurrent Engineering (CE). In a DFM/CE environment, a product and it’s process plan is initially designed, then finalized. In the final stage of the product’s design, a dimension of the product may be modified, which requires the manufacturing side to change the corresponding dimension without delay: consequently with the information on the manufacturing side, the product designer can make a correct decision quickly. This paper presents a mathematical approach to tackle this dimensioning problem in DFM/CE. Two cases are discussed: one is the size change of a design dimension, whilst the other is the datum surface change of a design dimension. The corresponding actions in manufacturing dimensions for the two cases are analyzed in detail in this paper. The approach is very simple and fast, and the product designer can view the response of the manufacturing side almost simultaneously when a design dimension is changed.

Dynamic web server construction on the intranet using a change management framework

As organizations increasingly emphasize effective collaborative working through networked systems, the World Wide Web (WWW) server and associated intranet technologies are gaining wider acceptance as a new enterprisewide information systems paradigm. In an intranet collaborative working environment, data used in the web server are usually modified more frequently than are those used in a traditional Internet web server. Thus, to support synchronous collaboration without causing any inconsistency among multiple concurrent users, the intranet web server must provide users with synchronized and consistent views of shared data. However, current web technologies have limitations in supporting this, largely because the existing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is unidirectional and does not allow web servers to send messages to their web browsers without first receiving requests from them. This paper proposes a web-based change management framework that can overcome such limitations and support synchronous collaboration in an intranet computing environment. The web-based change management framework facilitates management of dependency relationships between shared data in the web server and dependent user views in the client web browser and allows the web server to actively propagate changing details of the shared objects to all users referencing them. On the basis of the change management framework, we propose a dynamic web server that can support synchronous collaboration in various intranet-based collaborative systems including concurrent engineering design systems and electronic approval systems. The prototype system of the dynamic web server is developed on a commercial Object-oriented Database Management System (ODBMS) called OBJECTSTORE using the C++ programming language. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Dynamic web server construction on the intranet using a change management framework

As organizations increasingly emphasize effective collaborative working through networked systems, the World Wide Web (WWW) server and associated intranet technologies are gaining wider acceptance as a new enterprisewide information systems paradigm. In an intranet collaborative working environment, data used in the web server are usually modified more frequently than are those used in a traditional Internet web server. Thus, to support synchronous collaboration without causing any inconsistency among multiple concurrent users, the intranet web server must provide users with synchronized and consistent views of shared data. However, current web technologies have limitations in supporting this, largely because the existing Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is unidirectional and does not allow web servers to send messages to their web browsers without first receiving requests from them. This paper proposes a web-based change management framework that can overcome such limitations and support synchronous collaboration in an intranet computing environment. The web-based change management framework facilitates management of dependency relationships between shared data in the web server and dependent user views in the client web browser and allows the web server to actively propagate changing details of the shared objects to all users referencing them. On the basis of the change management framework, we propose a dynamic web server that can support synchronous collaboration in various intranet-based collaborative systems including concurrent engineering design systems and electronic approval systems. The prototype system of the dynamic web server is developed on a commercial Object-oriented Database Management System (ODBMS) called OBJECTSTORE using the C++ programming language. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Concurrent Design of Mechanical Systems Using Operator-Acting Modules.

Concurrent Engineering is a methodology allowing designers and manufacturing engineers to work in parallel, or concurrently, during various stages of product design and manufacturing. Given the variety of concurrent engineering design methods, this paper proposes a concurrent design method for mechanical systems using operator acting modules. In this method, in order to simplify the system being considered, it is divided into modules. Then, the modules' specifications and the system are changed by using operators which act to expand the design space. By using modules to express the mechanical system, several stages of design and manufacturing variables can be treated within the modules concurrently, in parallel, so that high performance and high quality machine products can be realized in a short time. The proposed method is applied to the design of a material handling manipulator consisting of several links, and the validity of this design method is discussed.

The framework for an expert system to generate alternative products in concurrent engineering design

This paper presents the framework and development of an expert system to generating alternative products based on the information of customers' needs and existing products derived from the product realization model [S. Myint, M.T. Tabucanon, A multi-attribute approach to product realization, Proc. of Pacific Conference on Manufacturing, 1994, pp. 553–560]. Depending on the specific design, the primitive parts and attributes are derived and stored in a database. The generation of alternative products is based on the combination of primitive parts stored in the database, rules developed from the expert system and the weights of the customers' needs. When deriving alternatives, there can be many possible alternatives and thus, the final selection to narrow down all possible alternatives is done by functional grammar approach. The gearbox design is represented as illustrated example.

Design for assembly at the New York City Autoshow

The annual International New York City Autoshow is one of the largest automotive exhibitions in the USA. This year more than ten new concept cars and several hundred new automotive design ideas and products were demonstrated for the first time in the USA, and to the international public. This brief report is only an insight to some of the selected trends in design for assembly, manufacturing, quality (commonly referred to as DFx), concurrent engineering and sensor technology applications, ideas and solutions in various new concept cars, planned as production models for 2002 or later, as well as in some current models that are already in the showrooms.

Putting concurrency in concurrent product design teams

AbstractTo ensure that concurrent engineering design teams are truly concurrent and are designing producible products, Motorola's Space and Systems Technology Group (SSTG) has created a formal design methodology called Five Phases of Design. The methodology requires input from all the members of the design team at each of the five phases of the design to ensure that producibility issues are addressed during each phase. To augment this process, a high‐performance concurrent product design team model was developed and successfully tried on a concurrent design team at SSTG. This article describes the five phases of the design and the team model.

Application of an inverse FE approach in the concurrent design of sheet stamping

Based on an inverse finite-element (FE) algorithm and the program developed, an approach to the concurrent engineering (CE) design of sheet metal forming products and processes is proposed for preliminary design. Compatible representations of part geometry and meshing, together with the procedures for building optimal input models for inverse FE analysis, are discussed. With a commercially available software, P3/PATRAN, product geometry and input models for process simulations are built, pertinent data being extracted for the inverse FEA program. As a result, process simulations are carried out without the necessity of defining the initial blank and the geometry of tools, thus simplifying the design process and enabling the designer to look into the formability and quality of the product being designed. Also, the product geometry and process parameters can be revised and easily changed to meet design-for-manufacturability for arbitrary three-dimensional problems.

Tool for the Management of Concurrent Conceptual Engineering Design

The following article presents in summary, a prototype computational tool supporting localized design agents in the generation and management of conceptual engineering design variants within a distributed concurrent engineering design environment.

An integrated graphical user interface (GUI) for concurrent engineering design of mechanical parts

Due to increasing competition in the manufacturing industry, the search for shorter product development and production cycles and lower cost has led to the emergence of concurrent engineering. Concurrent engineering is the practice whereby the design needs to simultaneously consider various downstream activities throughout the entire product life cycle, in addition to meeting the products' functions. This calls for an integrated design environment that will enable the engineers to evaluate multiple constraints from manufacturing, assembly, services, etc. at the design stage. This research develops a prototype for such an integrated graphical user interface (GUI), the Integrated Concurrent Engineering Design for Mechanical Parts (ICEDMP), in concurrent engineering. Using ICEDMP, the user can access product data from different domains of computerized tools in one software system and evaluate the design of mechanical products based on criteria of Design for Manufacturing (DFM) and Design for Assembly (DFA). Modules of ICEDMP include (1) a web-based on-line user's guide, (2) a part library, (3) a design guidelines checklist, (4) a part modeler linked to CAD (Pro/Engineer), (5) a part feature converter using Practical Extraction and Report Language (PERL), and (6) a knowledge-based design critique system. Parts created by Pro/Engineering CAD system are represented by features using the PERL feature converter. The design's consequential impact on manufacture and assembly is then evaluated by the knowledge-based design critique system implemented by CLIPS. Two design examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ICEDMP system. Using ICEDMP, the user is able to evaluate the designs using DFM and DFA criteria and obtain suggestions to improve the design in one integrated software environment. This will result in fewer costly design changes and thus reduce product development time and production cost.