Concurrent Engineering Techniques Research Articles

Re-designing of hair clipper using design for manufacturing and assembly

Evaluating the product functions and associating them with the manufacturing technique is crucial to reducing the manufacturing cost. Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DFMA) is a concurrent engineering technique that plays a vital role in redesigning of existing product or service by reducing its manufacturing and assembly cost and time, have the desired level of quality and reliability. In this research work is apply DFMA on existing hair clipper and decrease the net manufacturing cost of the hair clipper. Hair clipper is very popular for at-home use and is seen as an essential tool in hair grooming. The analysis of design for manufacturing and assembly is done using guideline of Boothroyd Dewhurst DFMA. The components of the Hair clipper were undergone alteration by using DFMA and redesigned approaches. In the same platform, the actual model had the redesign. The assembly time for redesign exhibited an enhancement of 49.25% where the assembly time was decreased from 322.91s to 163.81s and design efficiency was improved 7.219% from 7.432% to 14.651%. Hence, the best design of hair clipper was made which is having optimal value is achieved.

Multidisciplinary concurrent optimization framework for multi-phase building design process

AbstractModern day building design projects require multidisciplinary expertise from architects and engineers across various phases of the design (conceptual, preliminary, and detailed) and construction processes. The Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) community has recently shifted gears toward leveraging design optimization techniques to make well-informed decisions in the design of buildings. However, most of the building design optimization efforts are either multidisciplinary optimization confined to just a specific design phase (conceptual/preliminary/detailed) or single disciplinary optimization (structural/thermal/daylighting/energy) spanning across multiple phases. Complexity in changing the optimization setup as the design progresses through subsequent phases, interoperability issues between modeling and physics-based analysis tools used at later stages, and the lack of an appropriate level of design detail to get meaningful results from these sophisticated analysis tools are few challenges that limit multi-phase multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) in the AEC field. This paper proposes a computational building design platform leveraging concurrent engineering techniques such as interactive problem structuring, simulation-based optimization using meta models for energy and daylighting (machine learning based) and tradespace visualization. The proposed multi-phase concurrent MDO framework is demonstrated by using it to design and optimize a sample office building for energy and daylighting objectives across multiple phases. Furthermore, limitations of the proposed framework and future avenues of research are listed.

Concurrent engineering and machine learning techniques in medical science

Concurrent engineering and machine learning techniques in medical science

Quantitative Set-Based Design to Inform Design Teams

System designers, analysts, and engineers use various techniques to develop complex systems. A traditional design approach, point-based design (PBD), uses system decomposition and modeling, simulation, optimization, and analysis to find and compare discrete design alternatives. Set-based design (SBD) is a concurrent engineering technique that compares a large number of design alternatives grouped into sets. The existing SBD literature discusses the qualitative team-based characteristics of SBD, but lacks insights into how to quantitatively perform SBD in a team environment. This paper proposes a qualitative SBD conceptual framework for system design, proposes a team-based, quantitative SBD approach for early system design and analysis, and uses an unmanned aerial vehicle case study with an integrated model-based engineering framework to demonstrate the potential benefits of SBD. We found that quantitative SBD tradespace exploration can identify potential designs, assess design feasibility, inform system requirement analysis, and evaluate feasible designs. Additionally, SBD helps designers and analysts assess design decisions by providing an understanding of how each design decision affects the feasible design space. We conclude that SBD provides a more holistic tradespace exploration process since it provides an integrated examination of system requirements and design decisions.

Using Set‐Based Design to Inform System Requirements and Evaluate Design Decisions

AbstractSet‐Based Design (SBD) is a concurrent engineering technique for system design and systems analysis and an alternative to Point‐Based Design (PBD). System analysts perform Tradespace Exploration in early system design to assess requirements and identify affordable designs that meet complex stakeholder requirements. This paper demonstrates the use of SBD to inform system requirements and evaluate design options. We use an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) case study with an integrated Model‐Based Engineering framework with SBD to identify potential designs, assess design feasibility, inform requirements, and evaluate feasible designs displayed in sets with common design choices. We use SIP Math from Probability Management© to explore 100,000 potential systems design concepts and architectures in near real‐time. Using our integrated framework with 47 physics‐based models and 11 requirements, we found that only 2.5% of the potential designs were feasible. We validate that SBD finds the efficient frontier in the value versus cost tradespace. We use SBD to inform systems requirements by identifying the number of potential feasible designs in the tradespace for each requirement or combination of requirements. Relaxing the requirements can increase the percentage of feasible designs. Constraining or relaxing 4 of the 11 requirements significantly affected the feasible design space. We also use SBD to evaluate design options, which provides useful information for system designers. We conclude that SBD provides a more comprehensive tradespace exploration than PBD and useful insights into requirement development.

Integration of Failure Mode Effect and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to Improve the Packaging Process for Automotive Stamping Part

In the business world today, organizations must be able to respond promptly and efficiently to the changing market needs. Therefore, the flaw in the conventional approach such as inefficiency and time consumption can contribute to product failure in the marketplace. This hinders organizations to provide the performance required and should be improved to respond to the current situation. Concurrent engineering should be adopted to overcome the problems associated with the conventional approach. This paper focuses on minimizing the conventional method by implementing concurrent engineering tools and techniques. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to reduce the wastage of time and costs, as well as labor during packaging process, by identifying the failure of the existing process and choosing a new concept for the packaging process using the integration of FMECA and AHP approach. Failures in the current procedure of packaging process were identified by using FMECA analysis, and 4 new concepts were proposed to improve the packaging process. To select the best concept, AHP was used due to the variety aspects to be considered, such as performance, maintenance, time of development, cost of development and potential cause of failure, in the selection of new concepts. The result shows that the proposed new concept for the packaging process can reduce the time, costs, and labor, in addition to the various aspects considered in the selection of a new concept. This paper presents the importance of considering the concurrent engineering tools in the manufacturing industry.

Robust Approach for Concurrent Aircraft Design and Airline Network Design

Conceptual aircraft design directly impacts the structure of an airline’s route network and ability to service demand for various ticket itineraries between origin and destination city pairs. The decisions made in allocating new aircraft to serve predicted future demand of various ticket itineraries affects an airline’s risk and profit potential. Therefore, choices on the selection of target market travel itineraries to be served and design requirements of new, yet-to-be-introduced aircraft directly govern the tradeoff of risk against potential profit. This paper presents a concurrent engineering strategy for an airline that wishes to investigate the impact that aircraft design choices and target market capture decisions have on tradeoffs between expected profit and risk in serving particular demand itineraries. The approach considers the integrated domains of aircraft design, airline operations, and passenger demand within the context of a mathematical programming problem. More specifically, innovations are leveraged in a robust modern portfolio optimization that addresses issues of uncertainties in estimated measures of risk and reward and concurrent engineering techniques from multidisciplinary design optimization to provide integrated aircraft design solutions. The framework is first illustrated with a simple eight-city network problem where a conceptual airline seeks to identify the optimal target market capture for various demand itineraries and select an aircraft that can best maximize profits at a specified tolerance of risk from a candidate list of aircraft designs. This is then extended to the more general case of designing an aircraft under the same conditions.

Collaborative Engineering: An Airbus Case Study

This document introduces the main concepts of Collaborative Engineering as a new methodology, procedures and tools to design and develop an aircraft, as Airbus Military is implementing.Airbus designs and industrializes aircrafts under Concurrent Engineering techniques since decades with success. The introduction of new PLM methodologies, procedures and tools, mainly in the industrialization areas, and the need to reduce time-to-market conducted Airbus Military to push the engineering teams to do things in a different way.Traditional Engineering works sequentially, Concurrent Engineering basically overlaps tasks between teams using maturity states and taking assuming risks. Collaborative Engineering promotes a single team to develop product, processes and resources from the conceptual phase to the start of the serial production. The deliverable of the team is an iDMU (industrial DMU), a complete definition and verification of the virtual manufacturing of the product.

Collaborative Digital Data Management for Design and Production

Developing high quality products with lower costs and in significantly less time is the key point for competitive strategies of companies. For complex and large variety of products this mission can be accomplished by the help of Concurrent Engineering techniques which require a collaborative way of working of relevant departments in a factory.In this paper, the way of constructing the digital environment in order to supply concurrent management of Product Data and management of product structure for different configurations and their engineering changes via workflows in the Product Life Cycle Management, PLM is described. Digital Mock Up, DMU the main element in simulating, testing and demonstrating the virtual product is another concern that is considered.

Implementation of concurrent engineering to Phase B space system design

Concurrent engineering (CE) has been in use within the space industry since the mid-1990s for the development of robust, effective design solutions within a reduced period of time; to date, however, such applications have focussed on Phase 0/A feasibility studies, with the potential for application in later phases not yet demonstrated. Applications at the DLR Institute of Space Systems have addressed this gap with practical attempts made on three satellite projects. The use of Phase 0/A CE techniques, such as dedicated CE sessions, online trade-offs, and design iterations and consolidation, was taken and augmented with more novel practices such as online requirements engineering. Underlying these practices was a suite of tools coming from both external and internal sources. While it is noted that the traditional time and cost benefits expected from Phase 0/A use are less likely to be achieved for Phase B applications, the resulting solutions demonstrated an increased robustness and performance.

Research on Collaborative Design System of Mobile Crane

The concept of collaborative design and mobile crane designing are discussed, a method of concurrent engineering technique applied in mobile crane designing within network circumstance has been proposed. And a detailed description is carried on a sort of key technology—the line browsing and revision, which is based on a re-development of the SolidWorks drawing software on the .NET platform, the parametric design module of mobile crane is complete. Besides, with support of digitized coordination design tool, the Mobile Crane coordination design platform is constructed.

Actors’ networks management for design co-ordination

In a worldwide context of collaborative development of new products and/or services, companies have to control the design process to increase design performance. Formal and informal networks of actors are activated during the very first phases of product development projects in order to define the company’s partners in a more efficient way. Our goal is to study relationships between co-design projects and networks of partners in order to help project managers in setting up design teams. This leads to the identification of several drivers which influence the actors’ network use and leading. Drivers such as project organisational structure, concurrent engineering techniques, groupware-like and knowledge-based systems support and enhance such networks. We will base our experimental issues on an industrial case study from energy production sector. This industrial case explores the structure and the management of actors’ networks.

Major Factors Affecting Tugboat Ship Design and Construction

Tugboat shipbuilding activities and costs were studied with a view to deal with the ship design and development problems and to suggest possible solutions. The lack of communication among shipyard design engineers, vendors, regulatory authority personnel, and shipyard construction department managers at the start of the preliminary and detail drawings gave rise to errors in material specifications in design drawings. This caused the shipyard a significant amount of rework on drawings, resulting in wasted labor costs and lengthening of the shipbuilding cycle time. The timely and correct vendor-furnished information (VFI) on material specification, while preparing the preliminary and detailed drawings, would permit the elimination/ reduction of errors and changes made in the drawings. A medium-sized tugboat ship costs about $14 million, comprising about $5 million labor cost and about $9 million of construction material cost. The completion time for this kind of vessel ranges from 28 to 38 months. It would be possible to reduce the labor and material costs and completion time substantially with adequate and timely information of material re- quirements from the vendor through VFI. Management tools and techniques, such as concurrent engineering, computer simulation, and program evaluation review technique (PERT) could be applied advantageously to improve tugboat shipbuilding de- sign and development productivity.

A knowledge system to support manufacturing knowledge during preliminary design

The integration of manufacturing knowledge into the product introduction process is presented as a knowledge management problem. Concurrent engineering techniques are highly effective in sharing manufacturing knowledge, particularly for the re-use of knowledge at the detail design stage when the geometry has been developed. This research considers the use of manufacturing knowledge in the earlier, preliminary stage of design where the geometry is not so developed and where development of manufacturing technology may be required. An exploratory case study was carried out with a manufacturer of gas turbine engines for the civil aviation market. Semi-structured interviews were carried out to investigate the manufacturing knowledge required and its format. Using a data-driven analysis, a thematic code was developed and three themes emerged: manufacturing impact, expressions of impact and knowledge type. These themes indicate the requirement for a hybrid social-technical system to support both the tacit and explicit elements of manufacturing knowledge. An indication of the maturity of the manufacturing process also emerged as a major requirement in order to synchronize manufacturing technology developments with future product requirements. A prototype knowledge system is now being developed to meet the requirements identified through the coding analysis. The specification of the system, which uses a combination of information and social systems, is discussed.

Concurrent Design for Process Quality, Statistical Tolerance, and SPC

The rapid response to the requirements of customers and markets promotes the concurrent engineering (CE) technique in product and process design. The decision making for process quality target, SPC method, sampling plan, and control chart parameter design can be done at the stage of process quality plan based on historical data and process knowledge database. Therefore, it is a reasonable trend to introduce the concepts and achievements on process quality evaluation and process capability analysis, CE, and SPC techniques into process plan and tolerance design. A new systematic method for concurrent design of process quality, statistical tolerance (ST), and control chart is presented based on a NSFC research program. A set of standardized process quality indices (PQIs) for variables is introduced for meeting the measurement and evaluation to process yield, process centering, and quality loss. This index system that has relatively strong compatibility and adaptability is based on raisonne grading by using the series of preferred numbers and arithmetical progression. The expected process quality based on this system can be assured by a standardized interface between PQIs and SPC, that is, quality-oriented statistical tolerance zone. A quality-oriented ST and SPC approach that quantitatively specifies what a desired process is and how to assure it will realize the optimal control for a process toward a predetermined quality target.

State of the art of the concurrent engineering technique in the automotive industry

In this article a study of state of the art of the concurrent engineering technique in the automotive industry is presented. The importance and benefits of concurrent engineering in automotive industry are highlighted. The study in the areas of concurrent engineering tools, especially the information technology tools such as finite element analysis, computer-aided design and expert systems, is carried out. The use of concurrent engineering techniques in the development of the automotive engine and transmission, chassis and body is finally described.

A reasoning method for a ship design expert system

Abstract: The ship design process is a highly data-oriented, dynamic, iterative and multi-stage algorithm. It utilizes multiple abstraction levels and concurrent engineering techniques. Specialized techniques for knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation and reasoning must be developed to solve these problems for a ship design expert system. Consequently, very few attempts have been made to model the ship design process using an expert system approach. The current work investigates a knowledge representation–reasoning technique for such a purpose. A knowledge-based conceptual design was developed by utilizing a prototype approach and hierarchical decompositioning. An expert system program called ALDES (accommodation layout design expert system) was developed by using the CLIPS expert system shell and an object-oriented user interface. The reasoning and knowledge representation methods of ALDES are explained in the paper. An application of the method is given for the general arrangement design of a containership.

A Conceptual Design of the Concurrent Engineering Design System for Polymeric-Based Composite Automotive Pedals

In this study, a study of conceptual design for the polymeric-based composite automotive pedal box system is presented. This study describes the importance of the concurrent engineering technique in the total design activity. Several idea generation methods like the extension of the search space, the morphological chart, the exploitation of experiences, the gallery method and the voice of customer had been employed. Extensive application of the morphological charts enabled designers to identify the sub-solutions to each sub-functions of the pedal box system. The evaluation matrix method was used to decide on the final concept for the mounting bracket arrangement. The final solution for the polymeric-based composite pedal box system was three pedals mounted onto a common mounting bracket. The clutch and the brake pedals were pivoted onto a common shaft and the accelerator pedal had its own shaft. All the methods used were finally compared and evaluated.

AN IMPLEMENTATION OF A FRAMEWORK FOR COOPERATIVE ENGINEERING

This paper discusses a framework for Cooperative Engineering (CE) and its prototype implementation. Cooperative Engineering concerns the application of Concurrent Engineering techniques to the design and development of products and of their manufacturing systems by a network of companies coming together exclusively for that purpose. CE is a common practice in many industries such as automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding, defence, and pharmaceutical. This framework provides a formal model for CE. This is done in the context of distributed hybrid systems (DHS), a modelling and control framework for networked systems introduced recently by the control and computer science communities.

New Methods for Rapid Architecture Selection and Conceptual Design

New methods for rapid front-end development of complex systems are introduced. New tradespace exploration techniques, advances in integrated concurrent engineering, and application of risk analysis methods early in the design process allow rapid progress from poorly defined user needs to fairly detailed conceptual designs. An overview is provided of the methods. A process is described that allows thousands of system architecture alternatives to be quickly and quantitatively assessed vs user needs. The result is an understanding of the tradespace, including its key constraints and sensitivities, as well as an optimum architecture. This architecture is used to specify needs for space vehicles, which are designed using integrated concurrent engineering techniques. Research in risk and uncertainty, policy impacts, and information technology methods allows quantitative consideration of these factors, resulting in designs that are robust to uncertainties and policy impacts and potentially more versatile and flexible. Eight systems designed to date using the method are briefly reviewed. Key literature and a number of companion papers that go into depth on various aspects of the method are cited.