Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

The implementation of a cost-intensive Product Data Management System (PDMS) often fails because of false expectations within the companies and inadequate preconditions. Regarding the current enterprise capability for the deployment of PDMS, the need for a methodical evaluation occurs. This PDMS-capability is determined by specific PDMS-influencing parameters and can be categorized into several grades of maturity. The evaluation itself is conducted using the so called Capability Scorecard (CSC). The CSC is a potent tool which marks company specific weak points of a PDMS-implementation to systematically launch improvement procedures. The methodical approach for rating enterprises concerning their PDMS-capability as well as the CSC is content of this paper.

New innovative products and production technologies are increasingly important to strengthen the competitiveness of industry on the global market. To meet basic objectives such as high quality products at reasonable costs and delivery on demand and on time, innovation is a continuously required challenge. Many technical systems are based on concepts resulting from analyzing and understanding nature. Bifurcated structures are basic principles in the evolution of nature in particular to maximize stiffness while enabling light weight structures. Higher order bifurcation products are therefore a consequent approach based on mapping of evolutionary natural principles onto technical systems. The relevance of higher order bifurcation even increases if product and manufacturing innovation are taken into account simultaneously. Within the collaborative research centre 666 “integral sheet metal design with higher order bifurcations” a new product development and manufacturing approach is being developed. This contribution presents the concept of a new lifecycle information model for higher order bifurcated sheet metal products developed in the collaborative research centre 666. The main approach is based on a methodological understanding and a holistic description of the lifecycle. Originating from the lifecycle approach the architecture for a lifecycle phases integrating information model has been derived.

In this paper a person-centered, actor-driven project simulation approach is presented that can cope with highly parallel tasks in multiple projects and can, therefore, help managers to plan concurrent product development projects. The task execution sequence is determined by means of a bounded rational choice model accounting for the urgency of tasks. The model creates realistic project dynamics using only a small number of input parameters. The project manager is, for instance, not forced to specify fixed predecessor-successor-relations of tasks. The model was validated with historical project data from a company of the German electronics industry. Using Student’s t-tests the simulated project durations showed no significant derivation from the historical duration.

Pattern languages were originally invented in the 70s as an approach to capture design experience in civil engineering and architectural design. During the last decade the approach has been bruit about in the software community. In engineering design as well as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), pattern languages have yet not been applied. Because pattern languages have been applied in a wide range of application domains, they are supposed to be expedient to manage knowledge in a multidisciplinary environment like PLM. This paper discusses to what extent pattern languages are expedient for PLM and delineates approaches to develop a cohesive PLM pattern language as an interdisciplinary lingua franca.

The EU environmental legislation restricts the use of certain substances in products and, in addition, sets targets for recovery of products reaching end-of-life (EOL). Little support is provided to producers on how to obtain the best design alternative for their products (meaning the best compromise between cost and environmental compliance). The authors propose a strategy tool based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a solution to this problem. It will generate information needed to make the decision, will present it in a structured way and will permit the direct involvement of the users.

The development of engineering systems is usually based upon the deployment of classical software engineering (SE) lifecycle (LC) models. In the case of Knowledge integration in Knowledge Based Systems, specific knowledge Management cycle, often called knowledge engineering (KE) lifecycle, is adopted.

The objective of this paper is to discuss the relations between the software engineering lifecycle and the knowledge engineering lifecycle. Assuming that deployment of SE deals with the identification of the application components, KE tends to define the content of these components. However, these two cycles are deployed separately. The consequence is a lost of expertise in the final software solution. The goals of our study are to minimize this expertise loss by identifying the correspondence between the activities of the two cycles and to propose a common lifecycle for both SE and KE within the same system development project.

State-of-the-art tools and strategies applied in the early phases of product design offer tremendous benefits for businesses dealing with complex engineering processes — in terms of cost, time to market and product innovation. However, the early design phases are not only inherently complex; by definition, design goals are often loosely-defined and subject to frequent changes. With this in mind, the ideal software for supporting these critical process phases combines automation power with outstanding flexibility, user interaction, transparency and team collaboration options. This paper presents the Pacelab Suite, an integrated software environment specifically developed to support multidisciplinary design investigations. Central to the Pacelab approach is the use of a consistent object-oriented data model and knowledge based working techniques in capturing, formalizing and applying engineering knowledge.

Facing the industrialisation of computational mechanics domain, knowledge management can be a way to improve the efficiency and the reliability of results provided by calculations offices.

The present work is based on the assumption that intensive collaboration between engineers will support knowledge sharing, thus increasing the efficiency of the calculation projects. Our concern is to propose some simple and pragmatic ways to foster this collaboration and to build collective knowledge within calculation provider.

We present in this paper a part of the framework we developed to collect engineers’ knowledge during calculation projects. This pragmatic collection method consists in associating object handled during a calculation project with context descriptors. This collection framework has been integrated in a knowledge management tool called KALIS.

This paper discusses views on decision support in product development to identify factors of relevance when designing computer-based decision support for total offers. Providing services in form of physical artefacts offered as ‘functions per unit’ is at the heart of total offers. Total offers gain access to possibilities to ‘design in’ value added characteristics into the physical artefact, e.g., maintenance, monitoring, training, remanufacture. Contemporary computer tools seem to be insufficient to support a GO/NO GO decision for total offers. Relevant factors to take into consideration are to support learning and provide the decision makers with insights in a number of plausible ‘what-if’ scenarios to improve the solution space.

In this paper we propose and investigate the possibilities offered by a new approach to find milling sequences and chains to optimize the machining time. Optimized milling sequences helps the process planner in understanding and setting the optimal strategy to reduce the part’s machining time. Most previous chaining approaches concerned 2.5D pocket recognition for automotive mechanical parts. We present a new approach adapted to complex parts with a multitude of 5-axes orientation, focusing on our restrictive chaining algorithm based on the previously extracted machining directions. In a latter phase, the output sequences are filtered whereas we account the manufacturing fixture and machine-tool constraints.