Xinguo Ming

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.

Status review and research strategies on product-service systems

As present trends in economic and population growth continue, the natural environment is increasingly being stressed. More and more researchers, institutes and programmes have paid attention to product-service systems (PSSes) in the last decade because PSS integrates tangible artefact and intangible service to achieve sustainability, improve enterprise competitiveness, and meet customer needs better. In order to respond to the industrial trend towards PSS and frame the related research, the state-of-the-art of PSS research and development are reported. Furthermore, in order to integrate fragmental PSS solutions, this paper proposes a framework for product-service lifecycle management (PSLM) and technologies of PSS development. So, four categories are focused on: review of PSS, research about PSS development, a framework for PSLM, and technologies for PSLM (modular product-service development and ontology-based product-service knowledge expression and reuse). The preliminary solution of the implementation roadmap and technologies for PSLM which need to be perfected is proposed to lay a basis for further development and application of PSS for the benefit of industries.

A rough TOPSIS Approach for Failure Mode and Effects Analysis in Uncertain Environments

This study aims at improving the effectiveness of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) technique. FMEA is a widely used technique for identifying and eliminating known or potential failures from system, design, and process. However, in conventional FMEA, risk factors of Severity (S), Occurrence (O), and Detection difficulty (D) are simply multiplied to obtain a crisp risk priority number without considering the subjectivity and vagueness in decision makers’ judgments. Besides, the weights for risk factors S, O, and D are also ignored. As a result, the effectiveness and accuracy of the FMEA are affected. To solve this problem, a novel FMEA approach for obtaining a more rational rank of failure modes is proposed. Basically, two stages of evaluation process are described: the determination of risk factors’ weights and ranking the risk for the failure modes. A rough group ‘Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution’ (TOPSIS) method is used to evaluate the risk of failure mode. The novel approach integrates the strength of rough set theory in handling vagueness and the merit of TOPSIS in modeling multi-criteria decision making. Finally, an application in steam valve system is provided to demonstrate the potential of the methodology under vague and subjective environment. Copyright

A rough set approach for evaluating vague customer requirement of industrial product-service system

This research mainly focuses on the customer requirements’ evaluation in the early development of industrial product-service system (IPS2). IPS2 can maintain and enhance manufacturer’s competitiveness by integrating tangible product and intangible service. Accurately capturing and understanding customer requirement are critical for successfully developing the right IPS2 for the right customer. However, there are few researches on requirement evaluation in the early planning phase of IPS2 development. And IPS2 requirement evaluation often involves much subjectivity and vagueness. To solve these problems, a systematic evaluation approach for eliciting and assessing IPS2 requirement under vagueness is proposed. The proposed model of industrial customer activity cycle can efficiently support requirement elicitation from the lifecycle perspective. Besides, the integrated rough group analytic hierarchy process method can effectively deal with subjectivity and vagueness in the IPS2 requirement evaluation process. To demonstrate the potential of the approach, an application in an air compressors system is also illustrated.

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.

Modular Development of Product Service Systems

Since the early 1990s, the driver in our economy has been changing from production of material goods to product-service offers based on knowledge and information. More and more researchers, institutes, and programs paid attention to product service systems (PSS) in the last decade because PSS integrates tangible artifact and intangible service to achieve sustainable, improve enterprise competitiveness, and meet customer needs better. In order to respond to the industrial trend towards PSS and guide enterprises to develop PSS, this article aims to propose a framework of modular development for PSS. After a brief review on PSS development, six dimensions of modular product-service were introduced which are the basis of modular development. The process of modular development was proposed which are divided into three parts by order: functional, product, and service modularizations. Functional modularization realizes the planning of product-service family and the design of interface dimension and collaboration dimension. Product modularization realizes the product dimension and production dimension. Service modularization realizes the service dimension and process dimension. Finally, a case study on PSS development was proposed according to the method of modular development.

Intelligent setup planning in manufacturing by neural networks based approach

Setup planning is considered the most significant but also difficult activity in Computer Aided Process Planning (CAPP), and has a strong impact on manufacturability, product quality and production cost. Indeed, setup planning activity deserves much attention in CAPP. The setup planning in manufacturing consists mainly of three steps, namely, setup generation, operation sequence, and setup sequence. In this paper, the Kohonen self-organizing neural networks and Hopfield networks are adopted to solve such problems in setup planning efficiently. Kohonen self-organizing neural networks are utilized, according to the nature of the different steps in setup planning, to generate setups in terms of the constraints of fixtures/jigs, approach directions, feature precedence relationships, and tolerance relationships. The operation sequence problem and the setup sequence problem are mapped onto the traveling salesman problem, and are solved by Hopfield neural networks. This paper actually provides a complete research basis to solve the setup planning problem in CAPP, and also develops the most efficient neural networks based approaches to solve the setup planning problem in manufacturing. Indeed, the results of the proposed approaches work towards the optimal solution to the intelligent setup planning in manufacturing.

Failure modes and effects analysis using integrated weight-based fuzzy TOPSIS

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) technique has been extensively used as a powerful tool for identifying and assessing potential failures in different phases of the product life cycle. However, the conventional FMEA has been criticised much for its deficiencies in measurement scale, computation of risk priority numbers (RPN), risk factors’ weights, etc. In this work, the authors propose a more reasonable failure evaluation structure using fuzzy weighted Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). To fully reflect the importance of risk factors severity (S), occurrence (O) and detection (D), the authors consider integrating both subjective weights and objective weights, which is not presented in literature before, avoid failure modes from being underestimated or overestimated. For ranking fuzzy TOPSIS is adopted to get the closeness coefficient for each failure mode. Then, all failure modes can be ranked according to the closeness coefficients. A case of nuclear reheat valve system is provided to illustrate the applications and benefits of proposed FMEA method.

Risk evaluation of customer integration in new product development under uncertainty

This study mainly focuses on the risk evaluation of customer integration in new product development. Customer integration in product innovation projects has been widely recognized a best practice to enhance innovation success rate and reduces the development cycle time, but it also has many potential risks including loss of know-how, much dependence on customer, and limitation to incremental innovations, etc. Unfortunately, there are few researches about risk evaluation for customer integration which is important to the risk management of the co-innovation process. Further, evaluating customer integration risk involves much subjectivity and vagueness. To manipulate this problem, a novel evaluation approach for assessing customer integration risk under uncertainty is proposed. The novel approach integrates the merit of rough set theory in handling vagueness and the strength of group analytic hierarchy process (GAHP) in modeling hierarchy evaluation. Finally, an application in a project of mobile phone development is provided to demonstrate the application and potential of the methodology.