Steven B. Shooter

A foundation for interoperability in next-generation product development systems

United States industry spends billions of dollars as a result of poor interoperability between computer-aided engineering software tools. While ongoing standards development efforts are attempting to address this problem in todays tools, the more significant demand in next-generation tools will be for representations that allow information used or generated during various product development activities to feed forward and backward into others by way of direct electronic interchange. Although the next generation of tools has the potential for greatly increased benefits, there is also a potential for the cost of poor interoperability to multiply. The goal of this work is to develop representations of information that are unavailable in traditional computer-aided engineering tools to support the exchange of product information in a distributed product development environment. This paper develops a vision of next-generation product development systems and provides a core representation for product development information on which future systems can be built.

A Methodology for Product Family Ontology Development using Formal Concept Analysis and Web Ontology Language

The use of ontologies for information sharing is well documented in the literature, but the lack of a comprehensive and systematic methodology for constructing product ontologies has limited the process of developing ontologies for design artifacts. In this paper we introduce the Product Family Ontology Development Methodology (PFODM), a novel methodology to develop formal product ontologies using the Semantic Web paradigm. Within PFODM, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used first to identify similarities among a finite set of design artifacts based on their properties and then to develop and refine a product family ontology using Web Ontology Language (OWL). A family of seven one-time-use cameras is used to demonstrate the steps of the PFODM to construct such an ontology. The benefit of PFODM lies in providing a systematic and consistent methodology for constructing ontologies to support product family design. The resulting ontologies provide a hierarchical conceptual clustering of related design artifacts, which is particularly advantageous for product family design where parts, processes, and most important, information is intentionally shared and reused to reduce complexity, lead-time, and development costs. Potential uses of the resulting ontologies and FCA representations within product family design are also discussed.

PLATFORM-BASED DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT: CURRENT TRENDS AND NEEDS IN INDUSTRY

Many companies constantly struggle to find cost-effective solutions to satisfy the diverse demands of their customers. In this paper, we report on two recent industry-focused conferences that emphasized platform design, development, and deployment as a means to increase variety, shorten lead-times, and reduce development and production costs. The first conference, Platform Management for Continued Growth, was held November-December 2004 in Atlanta, Georgia, and the second, 2005 Innovations in Product Development Conference - Product Families and Platforms: From Strategic Innovation to Implementation, was held in November 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two conferences featured presentations from academia and more than 20 companies who shared their successes and frustrations with platform design and deployment, platform-based product development, and product family planning. Our intent is to provide a summary of the common themes that we observed in these two conferences. Based on this discussion, we extrapolate upon industry’s needs in platform design, development, and deployment to stimulate and catalyze future work in this important area of research.

Reuse of Manufacturing Knowledge to Facilitate Platform-Based Product Realization

Product platforming is a technique for exploiting commonality across a family of prod-ucts. While utilizing a common platform can have many advantages when developing andmanufacturing products, the approach places greater demands on collaboration, in par-ticular, the sharing and reuse of knowledge and information. Repositories are intended tofacilitate information sharing across organizational groups and geographically distrib-uted collaborators. A particular challenge in utilizing repositories is culling a search forthe most appropriate information for the problem at hand. The Reuse Existing Unit forShape and Efficiency (R.E.U.S.E.) method facilitates the search of information in a re-pository through three stages that consider similarity, efficiency, and configuration. Au-tomated search and filter techniques are implemented with interaction with the user toeffectively obtain the desired results. The similarity study uses thresholds to clarify dif-ferent opportunities for reuse. The user can then select alternatives for further examina-tion based on efficiency of satisfaction of desired characteristics. The degree of modifi-cation of the similar alternatives is reported to assist in the configuration of the newdesign. This method contributes to the field by (a) accounting for the variety of theproduct family during the reuse of existing process design information; (b) integrating anefficiency assessment for retrieval by considering characteristics beyond cost; and (c)addressing the search with a multicriteria method. The implementation of the R.E.U.S.Emethod is supported with an example of assembly line design for an air conditionermodule in automobile production.

A Model for the Flow of Design Information in Product Development

The complexity of modern products and design tools has made the exchange of design information more complex. It is widely recognised that the seamless capture, storage, and retrieval of design information is one of the major challenges for the next generation of computer aided design tools. This paper presents a model for the flow of design information that is sufficiently formal to eventually support a semantics-based approach for developing information exchange standards. The model classifies design information into various types, organises these types into information states and levels of abstraction, and identifies the various transformations that operate within and between the information states. The model’s ability to support a variety of design process models is illustrated by applying it to the Systems Integration of Manufacturing Applications (SIMA) design process model, and the model is then applied to a design example.

Toward a multi-agent information management infrastructure for product family planning and mass customisation

Development of complex new products requires numerous decisions by many individuals and groups, which are often geographically and temporally distributed. There is a need to share and coordinate distributed resources and synchronise decisions. Recent advances in Information Technology (IT) pose an untapped potential in assisting the capture, storage, retrieval, and facilitated use of product development information. By sharing assets such as components, processes, and knowledge across a family of products, companies can efficiently develop differentiated products and increase the flexibility and responsiveness of their product realisation process. This paper describes a recent effort in realising an information management infrastructure for product family planning and platform customisation. Particular focus is on current research thrusts:

Product Family Design Knowledge Representation, Aggregation, Reuse, and Analysis

A flexible information model for systematic development and deployment of product families during all phases of the product realization process is crucial for product-oriented organizations. In current practice, information captured while designing products in a family is often incomplete, unstructured, and is mostly proprietary in nature, making it difficult to index, search, refine, reuse, distribute, browse, aggregate, and analyze knowledge across heterogeneous organizational information systems. To this end, we propose a flexible knowledge management framework to capture, reorganize, and convert both linguistic and parametric product family design information into a unified network, which is called a networked bill of material (NBOM) using formal concept analysis (FCA); encode the NBOM as a cyclic, labeled graph using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that designers can use to explore, search, and aggregate design information across different phases of product design as well as across multiple products in a product family; and analyze the set of products in a product family based on both linguistic and parametric information. As part of the knowledge management framework, a PostgreSQL database schema has been formulated to serve as a central design repository of product design knowledge, capable of housing the instances of the NBOM. Ontologies encoding the NBOM are utilized as a metalayer in the database schema to connect the design artifacts as part of a graph structure. Representing product families by preconceived common ontologies shows promise in promoting component sharing, and assisting designers search, explore, and analyze linguistic and parametric product family design information. An example involving a family of seven one-time-use cameras with different functions that satisfy a variety of customer needs is presented to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed framework.

An Index-based Method to Manage the Tradeoff between Diversity and Commonality during Product Family Design

The competitiveness in todays market forces many companies to rethink the way they design products. Instead of developing one product at a time, many manufacturing companies are developing families of products to provide enough variety for the marketplace while keeping costs relatively low. Although the benefits of commonality are widely known, many companies are still not taking full advantage of it when developing new products or redesigning existing ones. One reason is the lack of appropriate methods and useful indices to assess a product family based on commonality and diversity. Although many component-based commonality indices have been proposed in the literature, they emphasize commonality at the expense of diversity in a product family. In this study, the design for commonality and diversity method based on two new commonality indices — the commonality diversity index and the comprehensive metric for commonality — is introduced to help designers manage the inherent tradeoff between commonality and diversity during the product family design process. To illustrate the proposed method, an example application involving a family of single-use cameras is presented. The proposed method provides useful recommendations at both the functional and component levels during product family design.

Exploring Semantic Web Technologies for Product Family Modeling

By sharing product design information across a family of products, companies can increase the flexibility and responsiveness of their product realization process while shortening lead-times and reducing cost. This paper describes a preliminary attempt at using semantic web paradigm, especially the Web Ontology Language (OWL), for product family information management. An overview of the ongoing work with Semantic Web is also presented. Formal product representation using OWL can not only store the structure of the product family but also help in capturing the evolution of different components of the product family. As an illustration, a group of single-use cameras, containing several products from the Kodak single-use camera family, is represented in OWL format. The methodology of ontology development that can support product family design is discussed in detail. Product family design representation using OWL promotes better learning across products and reduced development time, system complexity, and product design lead-time.Copyright

Using product family evaluation graphs in product family design

Product family design and platform-based product development have garnered much attention. They have been used to provide nearly customised products to satisfy individual customer requirements and simultaneously achieve economies of scale during production. The inherent challenge in product family design is to balance the trade-off between product commonality (how well the components and functions can be shared across a product family) and variety (the range of different products in a product family). Quantifying this trade-off at the product family planning stage in a way that supports the engineering design process has yet to be accomplished. In this paper, we introduce a graphical evaluation method, the product family evaluation graph (PFEG), that allows designers to choose the ‘best’ product family design option among sets of alternatives based on their performance with respect to an ideal commonality/variety trade-off determined by a companys particular competitive focus, and guides designers towards a more desirable trade-off between commonality and variety in an existing product family. Two necessary supporting pieces for developing the PFEG are also proposed. One piece is the development of commonality and variety indices to quantitatively capture the degree of commonality and variety in a product family and its functions and components. We introduce two sets of commonality and variety indices–the CDI (commonality versus diversity index) for commonality (CDIC) and variety (CDIV), and the CMC (comprehensive metric for commonality) for commonality (CMCC) and variety (CMCV)–to achieve this. The other supporting piece is the development of a quantitative representation of the ideal trade-off between commonality and variety in a product family, known as the commonality/variety trade-off angle α, based on the elements that characterise a companys competitive focus and their industry-wide competitors. A linear regression model is used to link the qualitative competitive focus to a quantitative engineering perspective, and then to estimate the ideal trade-off angle. The commonality/variety trade-off angle can then be applied to the PFEG to help designers evaluate a product family or compare product family design alternatives. Most importantly, the PFEG is not just the graph of the two sets of indices; it is the representation of the commonality/variety trade-off relative to the desired competitive focus. Four families of power tools are used to illustrate how the computation of such indices supports product family design evaluation in the PFEG. In this paper, we only use the CDI in the example application, but the CMC can be computed using the same approach.