Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

PDM and PLM are presently being widely discussed in the automotive industry. The car manufacturers demonstrate quite different technological approaches and advances. Nevertheless, the practical implementation is often insufficient.

The Digital Mock-up within Airbus has emerged from discrete applications to full 3D Aircraft design and development. Since the late 1990s programmes like A340-500/600, A380 and A400M have paved the way for integrated DMU operations across Airbus and its supply chain.

One cornerstone detailed herein is the Product Structure. It is vital for concurrent distributed collaboration with the Configured DMU and draws on dedicated views on the Aircraft to satisfy individual disciplines’ requirements for ways of working. Another crucial element is DMU operations over the Extended Enterprise (=Airbus plus partners and suppliers). It ensures that everybody can work with latest, complete and configured Digital Mock-up data.

The dependency between products and processes in today’s high-tech domains is very complex, and the resulting interrelations are difficult for the individual engineer to manage. This paper presents a methodological concept (templates) that standardizes the design process and its downstream processes. The results of an accompanying psychological user acceptance study are also presented and discussed.

Consumer requirements for product convenience, functionality and quality have lead to an explosion of diversity and complexity of market offerings. Successful enterprises must use sophisticated and highly optimized engineering and manufacturing techniques to stay competitive. These same market demands drive products to market with decreased time available between introductions of new product models. These rapid innovation cycles must be executed with lean processes that are continuously improved and optimized yielding reduced costs.

The daily practices in engineer’s professions are a function of new work methodologies implemented by industrial companies as increments in their way to manage the lifecycle of their products. Such methodology innovations often find their first full scale implementation in business environments, as opposed to academic institutions. It becomes then a challenge for educational designers to develop the learning content that provides engineering students with the knowledge and skills required to operate, drive and evolve new practices in product creation. For technology providers, who contribute to the concurrent invention of new methods and new enabling tools, there are several ways to contribute to accelerate the transfer of their generic aspects from industry to education environment.

Product development today is defined by the complexity in products, processes, and a globally distributed value chain.

The SPALTEN Matrix is a holistic product development process approach, which combines system engineering, the phases of the product development process and a systematic problem solving to one successful approach to handle complex product development processes. The SPALTEN-Matrix is the process backbone and cooperation, coordination and information platform for the product development process. This approach provides a long term planning and situation oriented problem solving during the product development process.

The evaluation of innovative ideas and products with regard to their success potential — in terms of market penetration — and the degree of innovation is a special challenge for research and development departments as well as for management. Therefore a new evaluation method was developed to quantitatively determine these two characteristic values. The basis of the new method is Quality Function Deployment, which was modified and expanded to consider aspects of novelty and enhanced customer and manufacturer benefit. The evaluation of the method in five pilot projects shows that the calculated evaluation figures are very well suited for decision making in the product development process.

Software support for the solution generation phase of the design process did not yet have the same industrial acceptance as e.g. 3D modellers and finite element analysis. The “smart synthesis tools” research project aims to bridge part of this gap between academic research and industrial application. The goal is to deliver a generically applicable method and algorithms to develop dedicated synthesis tools for industrial design processes in a standardized manner. Research addresses problem structuring, mathematical techniques and handling of experience knowledge and qualitative relations. An efficient development methodology is expected to increase the accessibility and applicability of synthesis technology to both the research community and industrial parties.

This paper presents possible new business practices that are being created by the PROMISE technologies (PROduct lifecycle Management and Information tracking using Smart Embedded systems). The aim is to facilitate and exploit the seamless flow, tracing, and updating of information about a product in all lifecycle phases, and thereby to enable feedback from post-sales phases to the design phase. Basis for this complete lifecycle management are product embedded information devices (PEIDs) and software tools for decision making and management of product-related knowledge based on field data gathered through a product’s lifecycle.