Jun Qi Yan

Collaborative process planning and manufacturing in product lifecycle management

Companies are moving towards quickly providing better customer-centric products and services improve market share and market size with continuously growing revenue. As such, the effective collaboration among customers, developers, suppliers, and manufacturers throughout the entire product lifecycle is becoming much more important for the most advanced competitiveness. To address this need, a framework for product lifecycle collaboration is proposed in this study. The details of these collaboration models throughout the entire product lifecycle are depicted. As one of the key elements in product lifecycle collaboration, technology to support collaborative product manufacturing is proposed, developed and implemented in this study. It is hoped that the developed technology for collaborative product manufacturing will lay a frontier basis for further research and development in product lifecycle management.

Technology Solutions for Collaborative Product Lifecycle Management – Status Review and Future Trend

In the modern global economy, companies are facing ever-increasing challenges for short time-to-market to enter into the market early, for reduced time-to-volume to occupy the market quickly, and for decreased time-to-profit to get return from market shortly. Product lifecycle management (PLM) is recognized as one of the key leading technologies to facilitate companies to overcome these challenges, which will offer companies a new way to rapidly plan, organize, manage, measure, and deliver new products or services much faster, better, and cheaper in an integrated way. Following this trend, this study proposes a full scenario of technology solutions for PLM based on the complete analysis of business drivers, industry requirements, limit of current solution, and recent state-of-the-art review in the domain related to PLM. Potential industrial impact of the developed PLM technology solutions is analyzed. It is hoped that the proposed PLM technology solutions will form the frontier basis for further research, development, and application of PLM systems to quickly adapt to the dynamic changing market for industry companies to pursue the most advanced competitiveness.

A PDES/STEP-based information model for computer-aided process planning

Abstract Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP) constitutes one of the most essential elements in Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). Although many CAPP systems have been reported in literature during the last two decades, few of them are compatible enough to integrate easily with other systems in the CIM environment. One major reason is the lack of an effective method to represent the information required by CAPP, and to unify such information with the information of other systems in the CIM environment. Indeed, this problem has received relatively inadequate attention in the recent research of CAPP systems. In this paper, an information model for CAPP is developed by using the object-oriented modeling and the Product Data Exchange Step / STandard of Exchange Product data (PDES/STEP) techniques. The model consists of the part information model, the process plan information model, and the production resource information model. The EXPRESS language or the EXPRESS-G diagram is used to represent these models. Indeed, the proposed information model will greatly improve the CAPP system’s capability of effective integration with other systems in the CIM environment, and, ultimately, to facilitate the implementation of the whole CIM strategy in manufacturing enterprises.

Mass production of tooling product families via modular feature-based design to manufacturing collaboration in PLM

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is recognized as one of the most effective approaches for better, fast and cheaper product development and management. Mass customization is one of the key technologies in PLM to provide tailored product to end customers with the cost of mass production. Characterized by short production lead-time and dynamic customer requirements with low batch size and high variety, tooling product families are facing the challenge of high production cost. New technology with modular feature-based design to manufacturing collaboration to satisfy the needs of mass production with low cost in tooling industry is developed in this study. A corresponding prototype system is demonstrated to show the efficiency of the technology developed.

A hybrid intelligent inference model for computer aided process planning

Computer aided process planning (CAPP) is generally acknowledged as a significant activity to achieve computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM). In coping with the dynamic changes in the modern manufacturing environment, the awareness of developing intelligent CAPP systems has to be raised, in an attempt to generate more successful implementations of intelligent manufacturing systems. In this paper, the architecture of a hybrid intelligent inference model for implementing the intelligent CAPP system is developed. The detailed structure for such a model is also constructed. The establishment of the hybrid intelligent inference model will enable the CAPP system to adapt automatically to the dynamic manufacturing environment, with a view to the ultimate realization of full implementation of intelligent manufacturing systems in enterprises.

A hybrid expert-neural-based function model for CAPP

One of the important activities in computer integrated manufacturing CIM is computer aided process planning CAPP . Although many CAPP systems have been reported in the literature, very few of them have actually been used in practice. This is largely due to the complex and dynamic nature of the process planning task, and the difficulties associated with representing and manipulating the required knowledge. In this paper, a hybrid expertneural-based CAPP intelligent function model CAPPIFM and its detailed architecture are presented. Such a model is designed on the basis of the experience gained in developing an integrated CAPP system called SIP which is supported by the National 863 High Technology Plan of China. Indeed, the model provides an effective means for achieving an intelligent, dynamic, parallel and distributed integration of the CAPP system with the other systems in the CIM environment.

Collaborative manufacturing process planning for distributed integration in tooling industry

Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) system plays an important role in helping manufacturing companies move towards enterprise-wide automation in achieving competitive advantages. Manufacturing process planning plays a significant role by providing concurrent integration capabilities, from design to planning, scheduling and manufacturing. A concurrent manufacturing process planning architecture has been developed to support the integration of process planning with design, manufacturing, Capacity Planning and Scheduling (CPS) for tooling production. A prototype system based on this system architecture has been developed and tested in a tooling job shop, with satisfactory results.

Towards Collaborative Innovation Via Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): Status Review and Technology Trend

Today’s global economy makes enterprise face ever-increasing challenges for short time-to-market, reduced time-to-volume, decreased time-to-profit. This requires companies closely work with each other for continuous innovation by leveraging intellectual property. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is recognized as one of leading technologies to facilitate enterprises to tackle these challenges. Following this trend, based on the complete analysis of business drivers, industry requirements, limit of current solution, and recent state-of-the-art review in the domain related to PLM, this study proposes the comprehensive future technology solutions for PLM. Potential industrial impact of the developed PLM technology is analyzed. It is hoped that the proposed PLM technology trend will form the frontier basis for further academic research and industrial application of PLM technology.Copyright

Collaborative design and manufacturing process planning in tooling industry

Manufacturing process planning plays a significant role by providing collaborative integration capabilities, from design to manufacturing. This situation is more acute in the tooling production industry, which is characterised by short lead-time and frequent dynamic customer requirements. A framework for collaborative integration between computerised design and manufacturing has been developed to support the integration of product design with manufacturing process planning. A prototype system based on this framework has been developed and tested in a tooling job shop with satisfactory results. The integration framework is also expected to be effectively applied in other similar enterprise application domains.

Special issue on: New Research Advances in Product Lifecycle Management

In the modern global economy, companies are facing ever-increasing challenges for shortening time-to-market, for entering new market early, for developing market share, and for maximizing returns on their investments. Product lifecycle management (PLM) is recognized as one of the key leading technologies to overcome these challenges. PLM offers companies an integrated way to rapidly plan, organize, manage, measure, and deliver new products or services to their customers. PLM provides customers, developers, manufacturers, and suppliers with the most effective means of collaboratively managing business activities throughout product development. PLM supports the capability of creation, management, share, and use of product data, information, and knowledge in virtual enterprise networks by integrating people, processes, and technology. PLM systems manage a portfolio of products, processes, and services from its initial conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. Following this trend, this special issue collects a series of recent achievements on the research, development and application of model, framework, standard, ontology, collaboration, and so on in PLM domain. Ni, Lu, and Yarlagaddaa reported the research result on ‘An Extensible Product Structure Model for Product Lifecycle Management in the Make-to-Order Environment’, which focuses on the master-variant pattern for building the product structure model to explicitly represent common characteristics and specific features of individual variants in the make-to-order business context. Wang et al. proposed the collaborative project management with supplier involvement in product lifecycle, with a scenario of what and how to collaborate with supplier, the system architecture, and the corresponding function, information, process collaboration methods. Ma, Jiao, andDeng developed the web service oriented electronic catalogs for product customization, in such a way that users can source competitive offers and generate feature-based CAD models from different vendors over the Internet with the key technique of the feature markup descriptions for the requested library elements. Fan and Bermell-Garcia shared the international standard development for knowledge-based engineering services for product lifecycle management, with the aim to facilitate the integration of KBE applications in a PLM environment, to support PLM evolving from the platform to manage engineering data to the repository of complete enterprise knowledge. Kulvatunyou et al. depicted the research on the development life cycle for semantically coherent data exchange specification to support reuse, promotes interoperability, and, consequently, reduces integration costs with an activity model for the creation, test, and maintenance of a shared semantic model. Sun and Jiang represented the research on tracking online workpiece machining procedure in a mobile collaborative environment, with a ubiquitousmachining tracking implementation in the mobile collaborative infrastructure. Users with different roles-playing are able to track the machining quality and progress, and to cooperate with each other, despite of their geographical places. Lee and Suh developed an ontology-based multilayered knowledge framework for PLM, including a systematic lattice structure with three product knowledge types of axioms, knowledge maps, specialized knowledge for a domain; and four layers of a product context model, a product specific model, a product planning model, and a product manufacturing model. *Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: xgming@sjtu.edu.cnAn apparatus and method for correctly determining the position of a vehicle in a traffic lane by obtaining correct information about the position of the traffic lane without being affected by variations in the road surface, weather, time of day, or such imaging conditions as fixed or moving lighting, are provided. An edge signal of a high spatial frequency component and a luminance signal of a low spatial frequency component of a digital image signal representing the view of the local area to the front of a vehicle are extracted. A road contour signal is then extracted from the edge signal, and a road region signal is extracted from the luminance signal. The position of the lane Sre is then detected with high precision by evaluating the lane contour Sre based on the road region signal Srr and lane contour data Sre.