Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Scientific knowledge of engineering within innovative industrial decision processes has a great potential to improve quality and productivity in industrial operations and hence improve profitability. This is a precondition for economic growth, which in turn is necessary to improve welfare. Innovative processes have to combine creativity with quality and productivity in order to achieve profitability and growth. The most important ways to improve profitability in industrial production are through an improved ability to meet more advanced requirements in new products and processes by using new knowledge and inventions and higher productivity through investments in more advanced and automatic tools. This is the fundamental mechanism behind industrial production seen as an engine of welfare. Besides the real world of the products and the production processes, the mechanisms for this development can be classified into three worlds. These are the , the and the . In striving to obtain increased welfare through industrial production, fundamental knowledge about these worlds and about their relations to the products and processes has to be developed. This paper is a contribution to this understanding, which is necessary in order to combine Total Quality Management, (TQM) and Total Productivity Management (TPM) into Total Effective Management (TEM) by understanding Means.

For the last 20 years, the focus has been on product development processes and developing tools to support them, addressing not only technological but also managerial issues. While these tools have been successfully supporting product development processes in a general sense, consensus on the direction of future developments seems to be lacking. In the paper, it is argued that horizontal seamless integration of product life cycle knowledge is the key toward the next generation product development. Knowledge fusion, rather than just knowledge integration, is considered crucial. In this paper, we will try to outline the directions of the next generation product development, its tools, and necessary research efforts.

In product development, many different aspects simultaneously influence the advancement of the process. Many specialists contribute to the specification of products, whilst in the meantime the consistency and mutual dependencies have to be preserved. Consequently, much effort is spent on mere routine tasks, which primarily distract members of the development team of their main task of creating the best solution for the design problem at hand. Many of these routine tasks can be translated into problems with a more or less tangible structure; often they are in fact an attempt to assess the consequences of a certain design decision on the rest of the product definition. Therefore, such questions can be formulated as: “what happens if....”. The question is subsequently translated into a need for evolution of the information content determining the product definition. Based on this need for information, immediate workflow management processes can be triggered. This results in a ‘train’ of design and engineering processes that are carried out, leading to a viable answer to the question. As the structure of a ‘what-if’ question is independent of the domain under consideration, the ‘what-if’ questions can relate to any aspect in the information content at any level of aggregation. Consequently ‘what-if’ questions can range from anything between ‘What if another machine tool is used’ to ‘What does this product look like if it is made from sheet metal’. Such a way of looking at products under development obviously strongly binds different domains and downstream processes under consideration, thus enabling a more integrated approach of the design process.

Principles of self organization are discussed as a frame of reference and a source of ideas for new design processes that can deal with more complexity in less time. It is demonstrated that set-based concurrent engineering makes effective use of these principles. Taking this idea one step further, an evolutionary organization for design processes is proposed.

Self-optimizing systems will be able to react autonomously and flexibly to changing environments. They will learn and optimize their performance during their product life cycle. The key for the design of self-optimizing systems is to utilize reconfigurable system elements, communication structures and experienced knowledge. The concept of active principles of Self-optimization is an important starting point.

The long-term aim of this research is to develop a method of indexing design knowledge that is intuitive to engineering designers and therefore assists the designers to retrieve relevant information. This paper describes the development and preliminary evaluation of a method of indexing design knowledge. The concepts for the method have been elicited from designers’ descriptions of the design process. The method has been evaluated by indexing 92 reports related to one particular aero-engine.

This article presents a systemic method for designing assemblies. It is based on generic concepts such as modeling of assemblies using assembly nested graphs which reflect the product design breakdown, the interfaces between components. The proposed method enables to assess the product producibility and the robustness of the assembly process. It eases impact analysis following changes of modified product functions or features.

A software tool, called GAIA, has been developed to support this method; based on a user-friendly interface. It enables specifying assemblies through interfaces and performing a functional and structural analysis of assemblies. Interoperable with the Digital Mock-up and Product Management Systems, it speeds up design changes and impact analysis. Finally, it is useful to grasp the design intents and to capitalize and reuse this design knowledge.

The adoption of this advanced modeling technique in support of the engineering assembly process improves the quality of designed products and reduces the cost of change management, customization and fault rectification by solving assembly issues at the design stage.

Every five years, the French Ministry of Industry launches a study about the key technologies for the next five years. Knowledge capitalization was one of the mentioned technologies in 2000. This paper starts with the description of some problems forecasted at that time and the actual situation since. In this context, a definition for knowledge management is presented, and some related concepts are proposed.

Finally, it is shown how the expert system technology associated with a cooperative design modeler allows the implementation of the knowledge management concepts.

Increasing competition for better product functionality, quality, features, customization, environmental friendliness, lower cost and shorter delivery time will require that product-oriented manufacturing and engineering enterprises optimize the entire product life cycle and become more responsive in developing products. For manufacturing of relatively long life and one of a kind products such as power stations or ships, the manufacturing and construction of such products are influenced by the state of the art technology and knowledge as well as other related issues. To maintain or even enhance such engineering systems performance in their life cycles, technical upgrading is necessary. Therefore, it requires a new design thinking process as well as methodology to address these challenges. This paper proposes a new design approach using Adaptive Design Extension (AdaptEx) that incorporates key design information throughout the entire life cycle of the engineering systems. This helps ensure that the original function and design specifications are not lost or altered due to the operation, maintenance or upgrades made to the system during its life cycle. As the speed of technological change will be continuously increasing, this new methodology will allow design engineers to accommodate for this radical change in technology and be able to implement it into the design. AdaptEx will therefore focus on allowing design enhancements to continue throughout the product life cycle. This paper will reveal the need for this type of design engineering development and summarizes some of the potential benefits of implementing the AdaptEx process.

Creativity and high efficiency are still the essential requirements for product design with wide impact on current design research and engineering practice. Design automation aims to increase the efficiency and quality of design work. Creativity is receiving more attention but with essentially little progress so far, especially in automatic design. The rapid and automatic growth of organisms and the great potential for production of new species that Genetic Engineering shows are the two main reasons that lead to our work. A new design environment - Product Growth Design platform (DARFAD) - has been developed, new concepts such as Product Genetic Engineering (PGE) are proposed, a theoretical PGA framework is discussed, and an example of product design is introduced.