Enhancing product development through a dynamic information interchange approach

In today's increasingly competitive environment, firms are experiencing growing pressure to reduce the product development lead time to meet market expectations. In this paper, a Responsive Product Development System (RPDS), which is used to model the product development process and the components of the process with object technology, introduces a dynamic product information schema characterized by its ability to provide design practitioners with a product data exchange standard, thus transforming data to information and then knowledge. To validate the feasibility of the proposed schema, a case study has been conducted in a plastic product factory based on the suggested approach. Following feedback from these companies, a further review of the design of the proposed system has been conducted to ensure efficient information flow across the heterogeneous computing environment. A measure of loss to society associated with RPDS in product development time is also included as a system evaluation.     

Towards a generic product modelling framework

In response to the current rapidly changing manufacturing environment, product modelling technology has been widely applied to provide the essential information for product development (PD) processes. The traditional product modelling technologies are unable to support the information exchange and share in various stages of PD processes that could be taken place among departments in a company or even among companies in distributed manufacturing environment. This has caused many problems such as information loss, data format incompatibility and reduced efficiency and effectiveness of product data applications. This has consequently created bottlenecks for the integration of PD processes. In this paper, a generic product modelling framework (GPMF) is proposed to overcome the abovementioned problems in today's manufacturing environment. This framework uses the standard for the exchange product model data (STEP) as a foundation. It consists of four functional components: an EXPRESS data model namely EDM; a STEP–based modelling environment; a “five-phase” modelling method; and three EDM data exchange and sharing methods. Case studies show that the product models built based on the GPMF are capable of integrating information in product design, manufacturing and assembly. The GPMF is compatible, comprehensive, and flexible, and is able to support information exchange and sharing.     

SHARED: An information model for cooperative product development

One fundamental issue in developing collaborative engineering systems is the representation of product information which supports communication and coordination. This product information includes not only the geometric and physical properties of the product and its parts, but also information about functions, constraints and the design rationale. In this paper, we describe an information model, SHARED, which was developed for encoding product information in DICE, a distributed and integrated environment for computer-aided engineering. SHARED provides multiple levels of both functional and geometric abstractions, multiple views and techniques for maintaining consistency between the various abstractions and views. These elements are essential for a good representation model of product information. The use of the SHARED model is illustrated through an example, depicting the various representations of a product as it evolves through the design process. The SHARED model has been implemented over a distributed OODBMS as a toolkit/framework for developing environments which need to model, manipulate and communicate product information between distributed cooperating applications, while supporting coordination between them.     

Web-based configuration design system for product customization

In mass customization, web-centric knowledge-based configuration systems have become an important tool to help customers configure products that satisfy their different needs and the complex configuration constraints of a product family (PF). An effective knowledge representation scheme and the associated reasoning mechanisms are essential for the success of these systems. This paper presents an object-oriented approach that integrates the functional and structural models of a PF with design process knowledge. Invasion-based search algorithms are proposed to deal with different situations in product customization and heuristic knowledge is introduced in these algorithms to improve the search efficiency. Optimization models have been constructed in terms of customers’ preferences to provide them with the highest satisfaction in product customization. Based on the representation scheme and reasoning algorithms, a web-based configuration system prototype is developed to support product customization. An example of a bicycle family is used as a study case and described in details.     

Three-dimensional human head modelling: a systematic review

ABSTRACT

Human head is one of the most important parts of the body, as it houses brain and other sensory organs, which controls functioning and working of the whole body. The products used for head and face are designed for functions like protection, information transfer, healthcare or to improve the aesthetic appearance. In order for them to serve their purpose, they need a close fit and in order to make it more ergonomic, user's comfort also needs to be addressed, thereby making it necessary to acquire accurate anthropometric data for ergonomic product design. Traditional techniques involve manual measurement using tapes, callipers and scales which normally have low reliability and low accuracy. With the advancement in image processing and computer aided designing and modelling techniques it has become possible to develop highly accurate and reliable 3D head and face model. Following paper presents a systematic review of different approaches that have been proposed for developing 3D head and face model and also the techniques used in processing and analysis of 3D data and their limitations. The paper also presents application of head and face models for ergonomic product design.     

Project competence in product development

This paper presents and discusses the individual competence particularly required to work in project-organized product development. Individual competence encompasses the knowledge, skills and abilities to deal with issues related to organizational, social and technological factors involved in projects. The purpose has been to explore the competence required for project members at the operational level, and to explore the conditions for developing such competence. The study is based on a qualitative approach, with interviews as the tool for data collection. The study group comprised 54 respondents working in R&D departments within five large Swedish manufacturing companies. The findings reveal the need for project co-workers to be skilled in both practical and psychosocial aspects of co-ordination, time planning and control. The findings of the study demonstrate the importance of being able to cope with prescribed as well as unpredictable processes. They also indicate the effect of time on experience transfer.

Sustainable new product development: a longitudinal review

Traditional new product development aims to integrate people, tools, and technology to shorten time-to-market and boost economic gains. Under the triple bottom line of sustainability, the integration with the environment brings an additional layer of complexity. Sustainable new product development (SNPD) is a new and ever-growing research area. This paper offers a novel combination of systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of themes in SNPD in the past 25 years. The search for the relevant literature in Scopus citation database returned 1541 peer-reviewed papers. The analysis of co-occurrence of keywords identified the main themes of product life cycle, product design, sustainable products, production and environmental standards, innovation, human component of sustainability, supply chains, polymer, and renewable resource. Concerns with economic and environmental sustainability were present since the early research on SNPD. However, there is a growing concern with a holistic approach to SNDP integrating people, the economy, and the planet. The evolution of themes showed a need to integrate further the social aspects of sustainability into SNDP. A research agenda closes the paper proposing themes that deserve further scrutiny, related to sustainable products, product life cycle, and product design.     

Application support to product variety management

Offering a large variety of products at competitive prices and reasonable delivery times is a complex managerial challenge that many companies have to address. Software vendors responded to this challenge by developing and proposing various solutions, such as product configuration (PC) systems, product data management (PDM) systems and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The relative newness, complexity and mutual interdependencies among these systems make it difficult to understand how they—individually and as a whole—actually support a firm in managing its product variety. Precisely these complexities, ultimately, add to the risks of software selection, leading companies to make inconsistent choices or to implement the wrong systems. Starting from this theoretical and practical concern, the present paper provides a conceptualization of the essential functions of PC, PDM and CRM systems, discussing how these functions help a company to manage its product variety and how they relate to each other. This paper proposes that two core data structures of PC systems—namely the sales and technical configuration models—are essential elements of the information management infrastructure of a company offering a large variety of products, because they enable a number of important product variety management functions also present within PDM and CRM systems.     

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.     

Hybrid simulation modelling as a supporting tool for sustainable product service systems: a critical analysis

Manufacturing companies are increasingly shifting their value proposition from a product-centric perspective to Product-Service-System (PSS). This evolution allows companies to improve the customisation of their offer and to contribute to reduce material flows and consumption, thus enhancing sustainability. However, when companies introduce PSS offers, they have to face higher complexity and dynamism, as customer behaviours, process requirements and sustainability assessment must be considered during the design and the development of the new solutions. In this paper, after the identification of the main PSS dynamic features, the authors argue that business process simulation (BPS) could represent an effective tool to cope with the dynamics and the complexity entailed in a sustainable PSS. This paper analyses and compares existing BPS approaches identifying the hybrid simulation (HS) modelling as a promising approach. In fact, according to the critical PSS features, HS allows grasping PSS features and integrating customer, company and environmental sustainability perspectives into the model, thus, supporting effective PSS design and assessment. These findings have been validated in a test case where a hybrid model (integrating Discrete Event Simulation with Agent-Based Modelling) has been compared against a pure DES model. The results highlight the advantages of the hybrid modelling approach with respect to DES in supporting the engineering of a sustainable, customer-oriented PSS provision process.     

Function-technology-based product platform formation

Product platforms have been effectively used by many successful companies for product family design. Technological advancements and changes in customer needs pose problems for robustly designing product platforms over a given planning horizon. To date, most product platform formation approaches are directed by structural (subassemblies and components) considerations and are seldom undertaken at the conceptual design stage. We argue that product platform design should commence at the conceptual design stage rather than the detailed design stage. It is noteworthy that physical structures are the end results of designs already frozen at higher level of functional abstraction. Hence, tackling the platform formation problem should start much before structures are materialized. We propose that the product platform formation approach should be considered at two different stages: (i) conceptual design stage; and (ii) detailed design stage. In reference to the Function?–?Behavior?–?Structure model proposed by Gero and Kannengiesser (Gero, J.S. and Kannengiesser, U., Function-behavior-structure: A model for social situated agents. Workshop on Cognitive Modeling of Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2003, Acapulco, Mexico, 2003, pp. 101–107), conceptual design would refer to the design of products at function and technology stage, whereas detailed design would refer to the design of products at the structure stage. This paper discusses a method to form product platforms at the Function-Technology stage which can be correspondingly mapped to the structural stages. Thus, forming product platforms at a higher level of abstraction would enable a better understanding of the complications met at structural level. The FT approach uses Function Technology Ant Colony Optimization (FTACO) method to determine product platform configuration(s). We demonstrate the proposed approach using the example of a computer mouse product family.     

The development of a conceptual model regarding the role of social modelling in safety behaviour: an integrated literature review

Social modelling is a process where an individual observes a model's behaviour and its consequences, leading to a modification of the observer's old behaviours or the acquisition of new behaviours. Even though diverse fields, including transportation and aviation, have reliably found significant results pertaining to the influences of social modelling on behavioural outcomes, there is a lack of research pertaining to social modelling's influences specifically on safety behaviour. This review details the safety issues related to the mechanisms, influences and effects of social modelling as a way to examine the potential that social modelling has in affecting employees’ safety behaviour. The collected research materials aided in the construction of a preliminary conceptual model regarding the effects of social modelling on safety behaviour. Overall, the review provides safety and organisational researchers with information about a gap in the safety literature and a model that can lead to future research to fill that gap.     

Linking management control system with product development and process decisions to cope with environment complexity

In this study, we report the results of a large-scale survey study on business strategy and innovations conducted in China in November 2002. We focus on the impact of environmental complexity on the choice of management control systems and the effects of management control systems on product development and process decisions. Our findings provide some valuable insights to strategic change. When the pressure for change comes from the external environment, the strategic control approach is usually chosen to cope with environmental complexity. Strategic control focuses on the process of benchmarking a firm's strategic and operational decisions with that of their competitor's. Additionally, strategic control emphasises R&D and new product development, and aligns manufacturing strategy with corporate objectives. This approach has a long-term impact on a firm's position in the market place. When the pressure for change comes from the inside of an organisation and the company is more interested in maintaining its current market position, financial control approach is usually chosen to cope with environment complexity. Financial control approach focuses on incremental improvement in the manufacturing process and short-term financial performance. This approach provides risk-averse benefits to the company.     

基于PLIB-STEP标准的集成产品数据模型的研究

 STEP(ISO10303)标准对产品全生命周期信息进行规范化描述,是产品信息交换的基础,但缺乏高层次的语义描述. PLIB(零件库标准,ISO13584)通过总模型、功能模型和功能视图模型类及其结构来表示产品设计原理和多域多级别视图显示.结合PLIB/STEP的特点,提出了集成产品模型及信息共享的机制.     

Advanced product development integration architecture: an out-of-box solution to support distributed production networks

This paper presents novel collaboration methods implemented using a centralized client/server product development integration architecture, and a decentralized peer-to-peer network for smaller and larger companies using open source solutions. The product development integration architecture has been developed for the integration of disparate technologies and software systems for the benefit of collaborative work teams in design and manufacturing. This will facilitate the communication of early design and product development within a distributed and collaborative environment. The novelty of this work is the introduction of an ‘out-of-box’ concept which provides a standard framework and deploys this utilizing a proprietary state-of-the-art product lifecycle management system (PLM). The term ‘out-of-box’ means to modify the product development and business processes to suit the technologies rather than vice versa. The key business benefits of adopting such an approach are a rapidly reconfigurable network and minimal requirements for software customization to avoid systems instability.     

Coaching product development teams: a conceptual foundation for empirical studies

Global product development teams work in ambiguously complex dynamic networks. Characterization of the distributed work environment includes many factors, including: individuals and sub-teams are geographically distributed; they belong to different organizational cultures; they operate in different time zones and within different cultural and professional-frameworks. From a communication perspective, individual team members may speak different languages and lack a common tongue. Even in these scenarios, project teams are expected to produce quality products and bring them quickly to the market. The design-to-market life cycle has shortened markedly in the past decade in many industries. How do they manage to perform effectively in the face of these many obstacles? Development team “Coaching” has emerged as a guiding force in many project-organized environments. Individuals may have arrived at the role informally, tacitly responding to the needs of teams around them, or they are professionals with formal training as we find in SAP’s “Design Team Services” group (Plattner 2007, personal comunication). We have observed that the coach provides project team members with assistance that ranges from problem solving to moral support. In spite of the growing use of coaching, there is significant confusion about the nature of the role, the attributes of good versus poor coaching, associated terminology and definitions. We report on the development of a conceptual framework for further research in the emerging domain of design engineering coaching. Our efforts began with an extensive literature review that yielded leading candidates for role terminology and the scope of the subject. With that framework in hand, we performed a field assessment (survey) in an industry-academic environment that is noted for the extreme nature of its project-based learning paradigm and deep corporate engagement, including a mixture of industry liaisons and academic advisors who are in coaching roles. We expect the combination of methods to provide common ground for further work and to better explain the issues to students and industry partners. The resulting framework consists of five main roles that design-team coaches have been observed to assume. It is anticipated that our results will help others identify new research questions and apply an expanded set of empirical methods.     

Problem identification in maintenance modelling: a case study

This paper is concerned with a problem identification and problem focus process in maintenance modelling. It endeavours to describe the process of moving from vague problem understanding towards more specific problem formulation and problem focus in the pursuit of practical decision making. This process was conducted using several analytical tools that complemented each other such as regression analyses, snapshot modelling and delay time modelling. As in many case studies related to maintenance modelling, this study also makes use of the experience of experts. It can be seen from the paper that subjective data estimates can prove to be a useful input for modelling. The analysis shows how simple modelling of maintenance problems can provide useful insights and better understanding of the problem in hand.     

Product configuration: a review of the state-of-the-art and future research

Being able to provide companies with a number of advantages in delivering customised products, product configuration has received increasing attention from the academia and lasting interests from industries in the past several decades. While several surveys and reviews have been reported shedding light on specific issues in product configuration, a general overview is missing. By systematically presenting important concepts, definitions and issues underlying product configuration, such a review is of paramount importance to develop practical solutions, which ultimately contributes to efficient design, development and implementation of product configurators in practice. This study, thus, tries to fill this gap by reviewing the state-of-the-art research on product configuration. It touches on the major issues, definitions and concepts in product configuration along with the corresponding studies, such as configuration ontology, system design and development, and configuration solving. Based on the review, future research is highlighted as well.