Lian Ding

Key characteristics management in product lifecycle management: A survey of methodologies and practices

Key characteristics (KCs) play a significant role in product lifecycle management (PLM) and in collaborative and global product development. Over the last decade, KCs methodologies and tools have been studied and practiced in several domains of the product lifecycle, and many world-class companies have introduced KCs considerations into their product development practices. However, there has been no systematic survey of KCs techniques, methodologies, and practices in this respect. This paper aims to give a comprehensive survey of KCs methodologies, and practices from the perspective of enterprise integration and PLM. The paper firstly presents a holistic framework of KCs methodologies and practices through the product lifecycle, and summarizes the fundamentals of KCs including their definition and classification, KC flowdown, and the identification and selection of KCs. A review of the KCs methods and practices in the product lifecycle is then presented, particularly in engineering design, manufacturing planning, production and testing as well as information and knowledge management respectively. Finally, the problems and challenges for future research on KCs techniques are discussed.

An approach to accessing product data across system and software revisions

Long-term users of engineering product data are hampered by the ephemeral nature of CAD file formats and the applications that work with them. STEP, the Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (ISO 10303), promises to help with meeting this challenge, but is not without problems of its own. We present a complementary solution based on the use of lightweight file formats to preserve specific aspects of the product data, in conjunction with a registry of relevant representation information as defined by the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (ISO 14721). This registry is used to identify suitable destination file formats for different purposes, and provides a resource to aid in the recovery of information from these formats in the future.

An integrated decision support system for global manufacturing co-ordination in the automotive industry

Global manufacturing increasingly faces decision challenges of how to better manage the dependencies between different activities that take place either locally or across different locations. Co-ordination decision making not only requires the right information to be provided in the right place at the right time, but also requires the right level of support from models for decision analysis and decision evaluation. Furthermore, the alignment of co-ordination decisions with a global firms global environment and its operations performance has been identified as crucial to the firms success, but remains a challenge to decision makers. This paper proposes an integrated decision support system (IDSS) that can facilitate manufacturing managers to make more efficient and effective global co-ordination decisions. A combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis and assessment functions has been provided through the systems four key components (a global context modeller, a multi-criteria scoring modeller, a configurator and a co-ordinator). The evaluation of the decision system has been undertaken through a case study within the automotive industry, which demonstrates the applicability of the system to provide decision support for realistic global manufacturing co-ordination problems.

Survey: A contemporary study into the application of neural network techniques employed to automate CAD/CAM integration for die manufacture

In recent years, collaborative research between academia and industry has intensified in finding a successful approach to take the information from a computer generated drawings of products such as casting dies, and produce optimal manufacturing process plans. Core to this process is feature recognition. Artificial neural networks have a proven track record in pattern recognition and there ability to learn seems to offer an approach to aid both feature recognition and process planning tasks. This paper presents an up-to-date critical study of the implementation of artificial neural networks (ANN) applied to feature recognition and computer aided process planning. In providing this comprehensive survey, the authors consider the factors which define the function of a neural network specifically: the net topology, the input node characteristic, the learning rules and the output node characteristics. In additions the authors have considered ANN hybrid approaches to computer aided process planning, where the specific capabilities of ANNs have been used to enhance the employed approaches.

Annotation of lightweight formats for long-term product representations

Companies operating in todays global economy are increasingly expected to manage the entire lifecycle of their products, and are finding advantage in a distributed, collaborative working style. However, existing three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) systems are not well adapted to this way of working. This paper highlights some limitations in the current applications, and presents a framework for overcoming them based on three strands of current research: lightweight representations, the annotation of CAD models, and representation information as defined by the Open Archival Information System Reference Model (ISO 14721:2003). In the proposed framework, a ‘stand-off’ method is used to layer information, in the form of annotations, on top of both CAD models and lightweight representations alike. These annotations can be circulated independently of the geometry, facilitating more flexible information flow across the whole product lifecycle. The approach is demonstrated with an industrial case study.

An Information Support Approach for Machine Design & Building Companies:

The recording of information regarding machine function, performance, and failure, which is generated during the machine development, commissioning, and service is vital to an organization. Previous research has shown this information is often poorly recorded or even missed during these critical stages. The work presented in this article offers a solution based on the core product model, offering the potential to be revisit and retrieved the information throughout the product life cycle and into any next iteration of the design. An industrial case study presenting the operation of the approach is presented.

XML-based Representations in Product Lifecycle Management

To support a collaborative environment and strengthen information management for the entire product lifecycles management (PLM) of products, there are increasing demands on developing new-generation product representations. The representations need to be of software platform independence, rapid sharing of information between geographically distributed applications and users, support of the entire product life cycle, and protection of commercial security of products. Conventional product representations, e.g., geometric or feature-based computer-aided design (CAD) models, are unable to meet such requirements. The extensible markup language (XML) offers several advantages, such as platform/application-independency, position-independency and machine-interpretability, so that it has the great potential to be incorporated with conventional product representations to form new-generation exchanging formats. This paper presents a survey of the XML-based product representations to support PLM.

Lightweight product lifecycle information management for small enterprises

In an increasingly competitive and global market, small enterprises can benefit just as much from product lifecycle management (PLM) as larger enterprises. However, the software currently available to support PLM is aimed at larger enterprises and does not entirely suit the more flexible business processes and heterogeneous systems environment of smaller enterprises. We argue that some of the most important benefits of PLM may be achieved by small enterprises using the combination of a full-featured CAD system with lightweight visualisation formats and a system of overlaid annotations that may be applied to a model regardless of its format. We outline a proof-of-concept implementation of these ideas and indicate where further work is needed.

Sharing Information throughout a Product Lifecycle via Markup of Product Model

The advances in wireless communication and the Internet are leading to an ever-more-global economy and unprecedented changes in business processes. Such a highly competitive global market demands that engineering companies must consider the entire product lifecycle and take advantages of different regions of the world by collaboration between groups based in different geographic locations. The experiences of collaborative enterprises have shown up many issues of communication and information sharing between separate teams or different users at different stages of a product lifecycle. This paper proposes a new strategy to strengthen information sharing among users and partners through the whole product lifecycle. The proposed method utilizes a CAD model to act as a centre-carrier to link the information generated by different users, especially at later stages of the product lifecycle, no matter which formats of the product (i.e., the original CAD model or its derived lightweight representations) the users own. The method provides further support in sharing and retrieving relevant information directly via the CAD model.Copyright

The Development of the Sustainable Manufacturing Processes

Sustainable manufacturing will be the dominate factor in the design of the future factory. Any manufacturing operation within these factories will affect the environment, be it through the waste it creates, the resources it uses, or the energy it consumes. All can be significant, but not all have been properly examined or documented. This paper presents an initial investigation into these issues related to subtractive machining and evaluates research finding against the waste hierarchy. The paper concludes by discussing the findings and presents some requirements and suggestions for the factory of the future.