Jinsang Hwang

Protection of intellectual property based on a skeleton model in product design collaboration

As markets are globalized and competition among companies increases, corporations strive to remain competitive by focusing their abilities on key parts of a new product, while outsourcing remaining parts to other companies. In these circumstances, relationships with business partners with regard to product design are not rigid and vertical, but rather, flexible and horizontal; thus, partners today can be competitors in the future. Therefore, the intellectual property of a participating company should be protected from other collaborating companies during the product design process. However, this safeguard should not be an obstacle to product design collaboration itself. As a solution to this problem, we propose a method to share a skeleton model among collaborating companies. By using this model, participating companies can share essential data required for the detail design of those components of a product for which they are responsible, while ensuring security of their intellectual property. The feasibility of the proposed method has been demonstrated through experiments in a development scenario involving a tub component of a washing machine.

Representation and Propagation of Engineering Change Information in Collaborative Product Development using a Neutral Reference Model

As modular production becomes increasingly widespread in globalized manufacturing industries, many components constituting a final product are being developed and produced by collaborating part suppliers who have the ability to design their own parts by themselves without aid from the original equipment manufacturer (OEM). In this collaborative product development, the important aspect to expedite engineering changes is that engineering change information should be represented precisely in a designer-friendly form and shared among participating companies in an effective manner. However, all part suppliers and an OEM typically do not use the same computer-aided design (CAD) system and they are reluctant to share their CAD data with other cooperating companies owing to the policy of protecting corporate intellectual property. These circumstances make it difficult for collaborating companies to conduct engineering changes, since a part supplier who is responsible for one part of a product needs other CAD part model data designed by other companies for the engineering changes in the typical CAD assembly modeling of a product. In this article, a neutral reference model that consists of a neutral skeleton model and an external reference model is proposed as a new medium for the sharing and propagation of engineering change information among collaborating companies.

Securing design checking service for the regulation-based product design

When designing a product, a designer has to follow regulations involved in all phases of product lifecycle. However, it may be practically impossible for a designer to be well-acquainted with all the regulations related to a product. Therefore, from the viewpoint of a companys competitiveness, it is important to provide a tool which automatically checks design results of a product in accordance with the regulations involved. Outsourcing a design checking service instead of in-house development can be an appropriate choice, considering facilities, human resources, and cost required for developing and managing design checking tools. In this paper, the authors suggest a method to prevent the leak of intellectual property, which may occur when providing design checking services. This work also discusses necessary data exchanged between a design checking service provider and a manufacturer. Furthermore, this work details design checking service procedure and system architecture of a design checking service.

Design Verification System Framework of Pressure Vessels Using Korea Industrial Standards

Product regulations specify requirements or constraints for products that manufacturers must comply with across the entire product lifecycle, from design and manufacture, through operation and maintenance, to recycling and disposal. This paper suggests a system framework and its essential components for the verification of a pressure vessel design using the industrial standards of Korea. The authors also present methods to generate design template data from legacy design systems and to construct a regulation knowledge base. The proposed framework is demonstrated through experiments involving pressure vessel design verification using a prototype system.

Translation of 3D CAD Data to X3D Dataset Maintaining the Product Structure

There has been a number of attempts to apply 3D CAD data created in the design stage of product life cycle to various applications of the other stages in related industries. But, 3D CAD data requires a large amount of computing resources for data processing, and it is not suitable for post applications such as distributed collaboration, marketing tool, or Interactive Electronic Technical Manual because of the design information security problem and the license cost. Therefore, various lightweight visualization formats and application systems have been suggested to overcome these problems. However, most of these lightweight formats are dependent on the companies or organizations which suggested them and cannot be shared with each other. In addition, product structure information is not represented along with the product geometric information. In this paper, we define a dataset called prod-X3D(Enhanced X3D Dataset for Web-based Visualization of 3D CAD Product Model) based on the international standard graphic format, X3D, which can represent the structure information as well as the geometry information of a product, and propose a translation method from 3D CAD data to an prod-X3D.