Lars Lindberg

Notes on Concurrent Engineering

This paper discusses Concurrent Engineering from a system perspective. The approach is to use analogies to control systems to illustrate central problems in Concurrent Engineering. ‘Notation’ is then presented as a useful concept to discuss the representation of the data flowing in the manufacturing system. This also shows that to perform a quantitative analysis a formal definition of information is needed, with an associated measure of it.

The Product Structure — The Backbone of CIM

In this paper we argue that the product structure should be used as the backbone for the modelling and documentation of the product. Fiat a general architecture of a Technical Information System. TIS, based on Functional Systems is presented. Then three major subsystems of the TIS are identified, and one of these, the Product structure System is discussed in greater detail. The product structure is shown to be in a sense both complete and stable, thus providing a foundation for a me CIM system. A simple, yet versatile, data model is presented, allowing variants and views of the product to be represented.

An Approach for Manufacturing Process Representation in Product Lifecycle Management

Current PLM systems have concentrated on product design, not on manufacturing engineering with its development of e.g. Material flows and layouts. This paper proposes an approach to describe how to represent the main required manufacturing process data using ontologies together with generic data standards. This approach makes it possible to develop translations between different software, and also providing users with the meaning of different concepts. It contributes to an efficient management of manufacturing information, with a focus on the material flow information as used in Discrete Event Simulation - DES.

Rapid Production Changes through the Coordination of Factory Layout Models and Activities

Changing the design of a factory in practice involves the change of a number of parallel and interdependent systems such as the machining resources and robot cells, the supply systems for electricity, water, air, heat and cooling, pneumatics and hydraulics, the systems for chip and waste handling, process fluid, communication networks, sprinkler systems, as well as the building construction. Thus the coordination of information and models, as well as of the design work activities, is of utmost importance to achieve a fast and flexible development process. This paper presents the results from a research project focusing on computer aided work processes and the communication of models between various stake holders in layout design. The primary objective was to provide methods for a coordinated factory development process with a facilitated information exchange and reuse of knowledge and models. Results concerning required layout and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) functionalities, as well as modelling and communication principles, tested in an industrial case, are presented.

Customer-Based Design with Constraint Reasoning

This paper identifies some principles for computer aided customer based design. In this type of design. technical prerequisites and the range of customer requirements are typically the same over ti ...

Service Oriented Integration of Distributed Heterogeneous IT Systems in Production Engineering Using Information Standards and Linked Data

While design of production systems based on digital models brings benefits, the communication of models comes with challenges since models typically reside in a heterogeneous IT environment using different syntax and semantics. Coping with heterogeneity requires a smart integration strategy. One main paradigm to integrate data and IT systems is to deploy information standards. In particular, ISO 10303 STEP has been endorsed as a suitable standard to exchange a wide variety of product manufacturing data. One the other hand, service-oriented tool integration solutions are progressively adopted for the integration of data and IT-tools, especially with the emergence of Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration whose focus is on the linking of data from heterogeneous software tools. In practice, there should be a combination of these approaches to facilitate the integration process. Hence, the aim of this paper is to investigate the applications of the approaches and the principles behind them and try to find criteria for where to use which approach. In addition, we explore the synergy between them and consequently suggest an approach based on combination of them. In addition, a systematic approach is suggested to identify required level of integrations and their corresponding approaches exemplified in a typical IT system architecture in Production Engineering.