Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Because of globalization and competitiveness, companies more and more often join their strength by gathering their R&D services into a virtual enterprise (VE) in order to develop engineering design projects in a more efficient way. The work we aim to present in this paper has been developed in the context of the European network of excellence Virtual Research Lab for a Knowledge Community in Production (VRL-KCiP). This network gathers 24 teams of expert researchers in the mechanical production field over 15 European countries. The works, which are carried out in the VRL-KCiP and in a VE are similar: engineering projects are lead in a collaborative and distributed way. The assignments of such virtual organizations (VO) are quite the same and consist mainly in producing collectively new knowledge in order to solve problems. Thus, managing knowledge is of major importance in such a context, due to the high value of knowledge today. That is the reason why, in this paper, we aim at presenting the framework of a system enabling conceptual knowledge management in virtual organizations.

Collaborative design is a collection of the co-operated efforts undertaken by a team of designers. Due to multi-actors interaction, conflicts can emerge from disagreements between designers about proposed designs. Therefore, a critical element of collaborative design would be conflict resolution. In this paper, the DEPNET methodology is introduced to support conflict management. This methodology is based on a Unified Modelling Language (UML) traceability model to extract the data dependencies network. This will allow identifying the conflict resolution team as well as evaluating the impact of a selected solution. A case study within an industrial partner is described to illustrate this methodology.

Competitive products and processes are developed by efficiently cooperating generalists and specialists. Integration of systems requires interdisciplinary teams. Beyond engineering expertise, project success highly depends on the ability to communicate and to document information. Globally integrated companies require staff that has both well-developed social and intercultural competencies. This is a challenge to modern engineering education. Universities can prepare engineering students for cooperative project work by moderating multinational teams and providing modern software and hardware tools to exchange information without restriction of time and place. Didactical and methodological approaches and suitable software and hardware tools are presented to contribute to efficient distributed product development.

The paper presents relevant aspects for building the Romanian Research Network for Integrated Product and Process Engineering (INPRO). Based on the principles of integrated engineering and by building a collaborative virtual environment, 9 research centers and a national research institute have decided to share their competencies and knowledge in the field of integrated product and process engineering. The integration of each partner in the INPRO network and the work modality are shown in the Joint Program of Activities. The main actions that are described in the paper are the creation, consolidation and development of the network, initiation and development of jointly executed research activities and spreading of excellence. Finally, some conclusions are elaborated.

Controlling product complexity turned into an important issue for product development. This paper introduces a methodology for analysis, interpretation, and optimization of complex systems comprising of interdependencies between several domains. Therefore, the multi-domain matrix is introduced as an extension of known matrix approaches. Furthermore, analysis criteria for system structures are defined that base on graph theory.

Nowadays, most mechanical engineering products already rely on the close interaction of mechanics, electronics, control engineering and software engineering which is aptly expressed by the term mechatronics. The ambition of mechatronics is to optimize the behavior of a technical system. Sensors collect information about the environment and the system itself. The system utilizes this information to derive optimal reactions. Future mechanical engineering systems will consist of configurations of system elements with inherent partial intelligence. The behavior of the overall system is characterized by the communication and cooperation between these intelligent system elements. From the point of view of information technology we consider these distributed systems to be cooperative agents. This opens up fascinating possibilities for designing tomorrow’s mechanical engineering products. The term self-optimization characterizes this perspective [1].

This paper presents the work on a collaborative and integrated design approach that supports the product solution emergence by least commitment. That design framework is based on several engineering activities that must be achieved concurrently. The first depicted activity aims at mapping product requirements to product breakdown based on FBS approach. The second one supports manufacturing information synthesis during the design process (i.e. DFM). The second part of the article presents the design of a Micro Electro Mechanical System switch to illustrate the whole design method. That example illustrates the information modelling previously presented and shows how the CAD model emerges from information synthesis during the design process. That example also allows the consolidation of the product modelling. In a second time, it shows that the method fits to the design of micro product and provides to the designers early behavioural analyses.

In recent years, globalization has begun to drive industries to operate in a highly competitive environment and to improve the time to market. In order to deal with this challenge, rapid production methods have been developed and incorporated into many phases of the product life cycle. Reverse Engineering (RE) technology enables fast design based on an existing physical object, and on-line 3D noncontact inspection significantly reduces manufacturing time. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the art in 3D emerging measurement technologies. Moreover, it proposes new approaches and methods for data fusion and digital processing of sampled 3D data.

Nowadays, digital document is becoming the standard way of working: travellers have lighter bags but mainly transmission of such documents is faster, and their use is far more convenient to search into them. Consequently, digitalizing physical paper is also very common: many people own a scanner at home. But what about objects? 3D artefacts also need to be digital. CAD software is nearly always used by enterprises for designing their product. But what about old objects, old machines, 100 years older or even more? These basics of technical knowledge have also to be digitalized. 3D scanning technologies are fully emerging in Industrial Engineering. Our scientific researches are targeted on old objects issued from heritage. We propose to virtualize them. But 3D scanning technologies need to be customized as we are working with patrimony where sometimes it is impossible to lighten the object or to move it. The aim of this communication is to define a methodology using a decision tree with adapted operators for digitalizing old objects respecting patrimony conditions. In addition, we illustrate our research with two examples where it has been used digitalizing technologies.

A structured design recovery framework has been designed to meet the challenges associated with creating a robust engineering model for mechanical components. To assist with the testing and verification phase of the design recovery process, a matrix based modified failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) has been developed, which targets tolerance variations, in order to diagnose potential problems. The information within the design recovery framework is extracted for the modified FMEA analysis. From the FMEA results, testing strategies are suggested based on the component characteristics. An example illustrates the modified FMEA methodology and highlights its merits.