Concurrent Engineering

Innovative product development and in-house process design have been largely studied and methods, such as concurrent engineering, integrated product development, or dynamic product development are set up to answer real needs of industrialists. However, no innovative product can be put on the market without a well-structured and well-organized network of partners. This simple idea deeply influences various aspects of collaborative enterprises. This article studies the close relationship between two parallel design processes: product design and network design. This paradigm called co-design is explained and some basic concepts and exploratory results are defined.

Following the introduction of platform-based products, especially considering that platforms are used for multiple brands, there is certainly a growing need for system engineering processes and techniques. This is further emphasized by the fact that companies faced with collaborative platform development frequently need to harmonize often opposing claims from stakeholders with different backgrounds, beliefs, desires and intentions. A core strategy for using resources (e.g., work-hours, knowledge, and production systems) better and more flexibly is to involve suppliers earlier in the development cycle. From this perspective, well-designed and efficiently managed supplier integration is a huge competitive advantage. Supplier integration may range from component design and manufacture to full responsibility for the design of complex distributed systems. The starting point for this work is the results from a previous study, made by the authors, in which a Swedish automotive company and one of its sub-suppliers were examined in order to identify communication barriers. This revealed several problems regarding supplier interaction and information management in projects where both suppliers and product owners contribute their unique knowledge. Following the previous study, the questions to answer include: How can platforms be represented to suit suppliers as well as orginal equipment manufacturers? How does one guarantee efficient, accurate and secure information exchange between the parties involved? Consequently, this article pinpoints some of the problems that companies involved with collaborative product platform development, together with their suppliers, must face today. To answer these questions, interviews, and document studies were conducted for a Swedish truck manufacturer. The results are oriented to the interfaces between product owners and their suppliers.

Designing complex products, such as jet engines, cars or certain types of software, necessitates the coordination of activities of many participants during the design process. Communication is seen as the vehicle by which this coordination could be achieved. Communication itself is influenced by many different factors that are connected. This study presents an exploration of correlations between these factors based on statistical analyses of empirical data. The research uses data collected via the `Communication Grid Method', (CGM) a structured maturity grid method to assess the perception of communication within and across team-interfaces. Five empirical studies in the aerospace, automotive, and IT industries where concurrent engineering is practiced are used. The results offer insights for researching and managing communication across inter-departmental interfaces. It has been shown in particular, how directly and indirectly linked factors influencing communication in product development form a network of correlations. Mutual trust and collaboration exhibit thematic centrality.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an approach for controlling and exploiting product-related information throughout its lifecycle as needed by various business functions. Concurrent engineering (CE) integrates several disciplines contributing to product design. Both PLM and CE involve information sharing amongst disciplines having a specific point of view regarding the product. While each discipline exerts its own expertise and methods on the definition of the product and its related processes, information must remain consistent for all disciplines and throughout the evolution of the product definition. Therefore, being able to efficiently manage multiple views fulfilling the needs of multiple disciplines is an important issue. This article, proposes a multiple views generation mechanism incorporated in the product feature evolution validation (PFEV) model. The PFEV model is a dynamic workflow that controls the information flow needed to support a product definition evolution (PDE) while supporting its validation by all the disciplines involved. The model addresses two qualities of an information system: dispatching relevant PDE information to appropriate disciplines and providing this information according to specific views. With current CAD tool implementations, disciplines will not need all the information obtained from the numerical model, which often comes from files characterizing the geometry. Thus, each discipline must interpret the information characterizing the product by performing some filtering or adaptation in order to obtain what is relevant to its function. Two cases are associated with the views generation mechanism that corresponds to the elimination of not-useful explicit information and to the adaptation of implicit information, respectively. To accomplish this, three alternatives are distinguished to generate a view: create a new view, recuperate an existing view and update an existing view. The process used to create a new view is composed of three stages: selection of data element to be treated, selection of treatment parameters to be applied, selection and execution of views generation algorithm. The generated view is then saved in a table of views characterization, which is used to recuperate an existing view. Three reference elements (treatment parameters, views generation algorithm, and knowledge parameters) are saved when a new view is created. These elements are used for each update required for the existing view.

Collaborative product development (CPD) has been widely accepted as an advanced collaboration paradigm that combines geographically distributed product development teams to develop product collaboratively and efficiently. Interoperability of cross-organizational workflows is important for CPD to facilitate the successful execution of the whole product development process across enterprises boundaries. This article, describes a timed colored petri net (TCPN) and process-view combined approach to construct cross-organizational workflows, and a three models framework of `TCPN workflow models — Process-view workflow models — Integrated process-view workflow model' is proposed to realize the interoperability of cross-organizational workflows for CPD. A multi-agent system PVMAS provides a mediated architecture for distributed workflow management systems interoperability among cooperative enterprises. Under this architecture, a service discovery algorithm is provided for discovering the most suitable services enterprises need, a TCPN algebra model and a character string mapping algorithm are proposed to automate the mapping from a TCPN workflow model to a process-view workflow model, and the synchronization points are designated in the integrated process-view workflow model to coordinate the execution of cross-organizational workflow instances. Finally, a case study of the collaborative development of a motorcycle is presented to verify the validity of our approach for cross-organizational workflows interoperability in CPD.

During design phase, engineering activities typically involve large groups of people from different domains and disciplines. These differences often generate important information flows that are difficult to manage. To face these difficulties, a knowledge engineering process is necessary to structure the information and its use This article, presents a deployment of a knowledge capitalization process based on the enrichment of Methodology and tools Oriented to Knowledge based engineering Applications methodology to support the integration of Process Planning knowledge in a CAD System. Our goal is to help different actors to work collaboratively by proposing one referential view of the domain, the context and the objectives assuming that it will help them in better decision-making.

A manufacturing system is a product, and has to be designed as any other product. Therefore, a need for adequate methodological support and tools for modeling, structuring, and control of the next generation manufacturing systems is recognized. In this study, the adaptive distributed modeling framework for collaborative design and operations of network manufacturing systems is presented. In manufacturing networks, several autonomous partners participate in dynamic design of a manufacturing system, its implementation, and adaptation. In this context collaborative modeling, structuring, and control in distributed manufacturing environment play a vital role. The proposed modeling framework introduces the common modeling space and enables a collaborative definition of modeling building blocks, model design, simulation, and operations support of distributed manufacturing systems in a dynamic environment — which is the realistic nature of the global manufacturing. The prototype of the framework is elaborated in a case study.