产品开发过程与数据集成管理模型的研究

针对目前产品开发过程管理与产品数据管理相互独立,无法实现无缝集成的问题,提出以产品开发过程链为主线,产品配置为辅线,建立产品开发过程中的文档与产品配置之间的映射关系,实现开发过程与产品数据的无缝集成.分析了产品开发过程中的人员、过程、资源等主要元素,建立了各对象模型,建立了面向对象的产品开发过程与产品数据的集成管理模型.     

产品开发过程管理系统

分析了PDM系统对产品开发过程管理的基本功能和不足，提出了一种集成产品数据管理和开发过程管理的工作流管理系统，提出了一种以过程活动为核心，集成了产品结构，组织，资源，成本和时间等视图的集成化产品开发过程模型。针对此模型，设计并实现了一个集成工作流建模，工作流执行和产品数据管理的产品开发过程管理系统。     

地方特色文化旅游产品开发浅析 ——以湖北省宜昌市为例

本文以地方特色文化旅游产品开发研究为主题,分析了文化旅游产品的相关理论,同时探讨了将文化与旅游产品融合的基本形式和特点。再以宜昌市为例,探讨了宜昌市旅游产品开发的三个发展方向,为地方特色文化旅游产品开发提供了理论依据。     

基于PDM的产品开发过程管理方法的研究与实现

分析了产品开发过程与工作流程的关系,提出了产品开发过程分析与改进方法,并且对具体的铁路货车产品开发过程进行了分析与改进。给出了基于Windchill PDM的产品开发过程管理方法,包括用户、组、数据域、产品生命周期、工作流程等定义与实现。经过实践证明,基于PDM的产品开发过程管理方法有很强的实用性,具有广泛的推广应用价值。     

基于快速原型(RP)的产品创新设计

RP能自动、快速、准确地将设计师的思想物化为具有多功能的原型或直接制造出产品,因此具有较强灵活性的基于RP的产品创新设计就成为了当今设计领域的新一代产品开发模式.文中从功能、形式、设计信息传递,服务以及创新主体的角度出发,阐述了基于RP的产品创新设计是功能、形式、服务等多维交织的组合创新设计.     

复杂技术产品的协同开发

以机床为例，介绍了一个计算机辅助产品开发的方案。应用该方法，在同步工程技术的基础上，能快速地实现复杂技术产品的协同开发，并使产品开发的风险最小。     

支持协同产品开发的产品数据管理模型研究

针对目前产品数据管理系统中的不足，依据产品开发内在规律，运用面向对象方法提出了支持协同产品开发的产品数据管理模型，文中引入了实体类，关系类和约束类来表达产品数据管理模型，为开发能够更有效地支持协同产品开发的产品数据管理系统提供了基础。     

基于设计管理方法应用的产品开发实证研究

产品开发中对设计管理方法的选择与应用是产品创新的重要研究领域.本研究通过调取设计管理方法系统中的方法模块,并选择有效方法模块作为核心方法组成模块组植入到产品开发策略流程中,建立起产品开发整体解决方案的设计策略方法模型,同时结合产品开发实际案例进行实证研究.研究重点主要集中在:①运用产品开发前期核心方法SET法寻找产品机会;②运用产品开发中期核心方法UCD法完成产品开发定位;③运用产品开发后期核心方法麦尔斯价值分析法和结构映射分析法进行产品价值评估.最终的研究成果将为产品开发团队提供有效的应用策略机制.     

共生理论视域下的堆锦文创产品开发策略探析

目的 从共生理论出发,提出上党堆锦文创产品开发策略,以实现堆锦及其文创产品的对称性互惠共生发展。方法 通过调研分析堆锦工艺及其相关文创产品的开发设计现状,评析堆锦工艺及文创产品的共生状态。从共生的角度梳理堆锦文创产品的共生单元及其已有的、待生成的共生界面,探究上党堆锦文创产品的开发思路。结论 上党堆锦文创产品开发设计中存在共生度不足、共生界面缺乏系统性、共生状态不理想的问题,其潜力远未得到充分发挥。堆锦文创产品开发中应注重在增加共生能量、强化共生界面、优化共生环境、拓展共生领域等方面尝试开拓文创产品开发设计的新思路、新途径。     

复杂产品开发中的协同工作

复杂产品开发的艺术体现在各个不同领域专家知识的综合。开发项目的确切过程是不能凶的，这种不可预见性只能依靠开发人员的灵活性和创造性加以克服。因此，产品开发管理的任务是协调各部件开发任务与总产品间经一台新型机器人的开发任务为实例，介绍了如何在产品关系的基础上分解产品开发过程。     

Impact of worker and shop flexibility on assembly cells

Flexibility can counter the negative effects of the loss of pooling synergy in cellular systems. In this study we define flexibility as the ability of assembly cells to reallocate resources to accommodate changes in family assignments (i.e. shop flexibility) and the ability of workers to move between cells (i.e. worker flexibility). We investigate the impact of shop and worker flexibility on different assembly cells faced with product mix variability over a wide range of experimental conditions. Three types of cellular shops are considered: strict cell shops (where each cell is dedicated to producing only one product family), flexible cell shops (where each cell can produce multiple product families), and hybrid cell shops (where some of the cells are strict and the rest are flexible). Results indicate that there is no cell shop that outperforms others, under all experimental environments. However, flexible cell shops showed significant advantages when the setup times were low, while hybrid cell shops provided an excellent alternative when setup times and the product mix unbalance were at ‘moderate to high’ levels. The strict cell shops demonstrated excellent performance when setup times were high, and the product mix unbalance was ‘minor’. Finally, the results suggest that in most cases, the implementation of only worker flexibility resulted in the majority of improvements with respect to the average percentage of jobs tardy.     

Effective Product Family Design Using Physical Programming

In response to today's highly competitive global marketplace, many companies are utilizing product families - groups of related products derived from a product platform - to maintain economies of scale while satisfying a variety of customer requirements. This paper focuses on scale-based product families and presents a new single-stage approach for simultaneously optimizing a product platform and the resulting family of products based on one or more scaling variables - variables that are used to instantiate the product platform by "stretching" or "shrinking" it in one or more dimensions to satisfy a variety of customer requirements. The proposed approach is also unique in that it employs the Physical Programming method, enabling designers to formulate the product family optimization problem in terms of physically meaningful terms and parameters. The design of a family of ten universal electric motors is used as an example to benchmark the effectiveness of the proposed approach against previous results. While the emphasis in this paper is on the design method rather than the results per se , performance gains are achieved in the motor family by using the proposed single-stage approach and Physical Programming.     

A multi-phase model for product part change problems

The parts of a product may be changed over the product life cycle for the purpose of enhancing profits, that is to say, product part change has a direct impact on production efficiency and customer satisfaction. The analysis of product part change can provide producers with related components/part suppliers by analysing the product's configuration. Before performing the physical assembly of a specific product, selected part suppliers are connected and have to verify their ability to assemble. This paper proposes an assessment model consisting of three major phases: (1) analysis of the assembly relationship among the parts; (2) preliminary selection of the appropriate parts and their suppliers; and (3) solution selection for supplier association. The proposed model solves the product part change problem for a given related quality level, operation and cost data. The liaison graph, fuzzy theory and value engineering approaches are employed in phases 1 and 2 to analyse the product's configuration and assembly relationships, to deal with production data and to carry out the preliminary analysis. To solve the solution selection model of phase 3, a genetic algorithm based heuristic approach was developed. Finally, the configuration of the stand module of TFT-LCD is used as an example to demonstrate the application and working of the proposed approach. The results of the illustrated example are used to demonstrate its efficiency and effectiveness in solving the part change problem.     

Investment in new product reliability

Product reliability is of great importance to both manufacturers and customers. Building reliability into a new product is costly, but the consequences of inadequate product reliability can be costlier. This implies that manufacturers need to decide on the optimal investment in new product reliability by achieving a suitable trade-off between the two costs. This paper develops a framework and proposes an approach to help manufacturers decide on the investment in new product reliability.     

Platform Design for Customizable Products as a Problem of Access in a Geometric Space

A product platform is a set of common components, modules or parts from which a stream of derivative products can be created. Product platform design is typically performed as redesign and consolidation of existing products to create more competitive product families by reducing part variety and standardizing components. The main disadvantage of such an approach is that the benefits of product platform design are achieved only after a number of parts have been designed and manufactured, with all the associated expenditure. A number of approaches, referred to as “top-down approaches”, have been proposed recently to design the platforms since the original design of the product families. However, current top-own approaches have two major limitations: (1) they do not enable multiple levels of commonality for different components and features, and (2) they have been applied to products that are variegated in one specification, whereas products are typically variegated in multiple specifications. This paper describes a rigorous top-down approach for synthesizing product platforms that facilitates the realization of a stream of customized product variants, and which accommodates naturally multiple levels of commonality and multiple customizable specifications. The proposed approach is based on the formulation of the platform design as a problem of access in a geometric space. The proposed approach is illustrated with a case example, namely, the design of a product platform for a line of customizable pressure vessels.     

A Method for Architecting Product Platforms

Consider a group of products sharing common parts and assemblies. The products in question we call a product family, and the common elements, the platform. In this paper, we present a method for designing product platforms and the derived family that takes into consideration both the technical performance requirements as well as the cost of the product family. The design of a platform-based product family is formulated as a general optimization problem in which the advantages of designing a common platform must be balanced against the constraints of the individual product variants and constraints of the family as a whole. This optimization approach forms the basis for a practical implementation as an interactive, team-based negotiation model for designing a family of interplanetary spacecraft based on a common platform. The approach is used to consider and specify different subsystems that could be made common to all the missions. It is also used to evaluate the impact of those platform design decisions on the performance of the product family, and thus be able to select from among feasible platform designs.     

A unified product structure management for enterprise business process integration throughout the product lifecycle

Information availability is a key factor for business success and competitive advantage. While created by design engineers, product structure is accessed and referenced by other users involved in product lifecycle from various departments. However, there is a lack of efficient ways of managing product structure information for enterprise business process integration. This study proposes a unified product structure management model to fill in this gap. With this proposed model, the product structure is managed in a unified way and can be accessed by different people with various disciplines in the right formats throughout the entire product lifecycle, including business processes of quotation, sales order processing, design, planning, scheduling, production, and delivery. This research is part of the enterprise business information management system project whose purpose is to streamline the information management for key business processes to integrate multi-disciplines in an enterprise for product development. A prototype system has been implemented to verify the model developed by taking real cases in a mould-manufacturing company. The results show the potential for substantial improvements in industrial competitive advantage.     

A cost-based methodology for evaluating product platform commonality sourcing decisions with two examples

As more US companies source tooling development and manufacturing overseas in countries like China and Taiwan, are the need and primary drivers for product platforms diminishing? As tooling cost is reduced to a very small percentage of the total project cost, combined with availability of inexpensive purchased components and low labour rates, the need to develop product platforms can decrease substantially. Low cost outsourcing has given firms the ability to develop and manufacture products cheaply without having to spend the additional time and effort to develop product platforms and families. In this paper, two examples involving two consumer product companies and their product lines are presented. Product family components and estimated tooling costs are analyzed, as well as development timing and profit margins to demonstrate why companies are moving away from product platforms in certain types of consumer products. A novel methodology using component commonality decisions relating to major cost drivers is introduced and applied to both examples. Based on the evidence from the examples presented in this paper, there appears to be little financial or functional benefit to develop product platforms that share common components or subsystems when these products are being manufactured offshore; however, even when considering outsourcing, platform-based product development principles can still yield tangible improvements in production costs over the life of the product.     

A Variation-Based Method for Product Family Design

Product family design entails all of the challenges of product design while adding the complexity of coordinating the design of multiple products in an effort to maximize commonality across a set of products without compromising their individual performance. This paper presents the Variation-Based Platform Design Method (VBPDM) for product family design, which aims to satisfy a range of performance requirements using the smallest variation of the product designs in the family. In the first stage of the VBPDM, the product platform around which the product family is to be developed is identified. The product platform is common to all of the products in the family and represents the maximum standardization possible considering the variety of performance requirements that must be satisfied. To satisfy the range of performance requirements for the product family, a ranged set of solutions is found using variation-based modeling. A compromise Decision Support Problem (DSP) is formulated to solve the tradeoff between satisfying the variety requirement and maximizing platform commonality. Platform commonality is achieved by introducing a commonality goal that seeks to minimize the deviation of the input design variables while satisfying the range of performance requirements. Those design variables that show small deviations are held constant to form the product platform. In the second stage of the VBPDM, each individual product is designed around the common platform such that the functional requirements for each product in the family are best satisfied. As an example, the proposed method is used to develop a family of universal electric motors designed to meet a range of torque requirements. The results are compared against previous work on the same example.