A Unified Information Model for Product Family Design Management

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jyotirmaya Nanda ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Steven B. Shooter ◽  
Robert B. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Description Logic ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Information Model ◽  
Design Management ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Design Information ◽  
Ontology Language ◽  
Information Exploration ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

A flexible information model for systematic development and deployment of product families during all phases of the product realization process is crucial for product-oriented organizations. In this paper we propose a unified information model to capture, share, and organize product design contents, concepts, and contexts across different phases of the product realization process using a web ontology language (OWL) representation. Representing product families by preconceived common ontologies shows promise in promoting component sharing while facilitating search and exploration of design information over various phases and spanning multiple products in a family. Three distinct types of design information, namely, (1) customer needs, (2) product functions, and (3) product components captured during different phases of the product realization process, are considered in this paper to demonstrate the proposed information model. Product vector and function component mapping matrices along with the common ontologies are utilized for designer-initiated information exploration and aggregation. As a demonstration, six products from a family of power tools are represented in OWL DL (Description Logic) format, capturing distinct information needed during the various phases of product realization.

Design for Mass Customization by Developing Product Family Architecture

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell M. Tseng ◽  
Jianxin Jiao
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Mass Customization ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Customer Requirements ◽  
Market Positioning ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Integration Platform ◽  
Product Family Architecture ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

Abstract Mass customization is becoming an important agenda in industry and academia alike. This paper deals with mass customization from a product development perspective. A framework of design for mass customization (DFMC) by developing product family architecture (PFA) is presented. To deal with tradeoffs between diversity of customer requirements and reusability of design and process capabilities, DFMC advocates shifting product development from designing individual products to designing product families. As the core of DFMC, the concept of PFA is developed to assist different functional departments within a manufacturing enterprise to work together cohesively. A PFA describes variety and product families and performs as a generic product platform for product differentiation in which individual customer requirements can be satisfied through systematic decisions of developing product variants. Based on such a PFA, the DFMC framework provides a unifying integration platform for synchronizing market positioning, soliciting customer requirements, increasing reusability, and enhancing manufacturing scale of economy across the entire product realization process.

scholarly journals Product design lifecycle information model (PDLIM)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaojing Niu ◽  
Meili Wang ◽  
Shengfeng Qin
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Main Product ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Information Model ◽  
Design Management ◽  
Design Environment ◽  
Product Lifecycle ◽  
Design Information ◽  
Role Modelling ◽  
Design Paradigm

AbstractIn response to rapidly changing market and customer needs, product design and development (PDD) is evolving into a human-centred and data-driven design paradigm. The design environment gets more open often involving crowdsourcing and the design process becomes more complex, considering product family design along product whole lifecycle development, and needing more data support. Therefore, it is critical to effectively capture, share, and manage design-related information in such a complex design environment. From this perspective, it is a prerequisite to have a proper product design lifecycle information model (PDLIM) to guide information gathering, sharing and management. To the best of our knowledge, currently, there lacks such a PDLIM to support effective PDD, though digital twin (DT) technology shows a great potential of supporting product lifecycle information collection and management. In this paper, the overall structure of the proposed PDLIM is firstly developed to frame in all main product lifecycle stages and the corresponding key phases for structurally capturing and storing necessary data along a product lifecycle. Secondly, key design information items against the main product lifecycle stages and their corresponding key phases are explored from literature reviews and case study analyses. Thirdly, the necessity of the identified information items in the PDLIM is qualitatively evaluated by two case studies. Finally, the PDLIM is further evaluated by applying formal object-role modelling (ORM) to demonstrate how design information items are used and interacted in exemplary design interaction scenarios, and to approve that it can be formally described and managed as an information model. The evaluation results show that the PDLIM is feasible to be adapted in a crowdsourcing-combined PDD process for supporting design management, reviewing, quality control, and next round product redesign and improvement.

Augmenting a Design Repository to Facilitate Product Family Planning

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Fledderjohn ◽  
Steven B. Shooter ◽  
Robert B. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Data Structure ◽  
Information Flow ◽  
Flow Model ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Design Information ◽  
Single Use ◽  
Tool Set ◽  
Information Flow Model ◽  
Flow Of Information

A Design Repository has been created in an effort to archive existing products and the components in each product. With this function-based archiving system, designers can retrieve design information on existing products to assist in a new design project. The use of product families has emerged as an approach to exploit commonality for more efficient product development. However, the Design Repository does not contain explicit design information on platforms and modules. This paper describes information for the design of a platform and proposes a new data structure that organizes the information for augmenting the Design Repository. An information flow model for the development of a single product is modified to describe the flow of information needed for product platform design. The information flow model and associated data structure has been shown to be effective in representing three common product families: the Black & Decker Firestorm tool set, Kodak single-use cameras, and the IceDozer family of ice scrapers. With this data structure implemented into the existing repository, designers can find useful information on how to create different products based on the a common platform.

Toward an Information Management Infrastructure for Product Family Planning and Mass Customization

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven B. Shooter ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Soundar R. T. Kumara ◽  
Robert B. Stone ◽  
Janis P. Terpenny
Keyword(s):  
Family Planning ◽  
Product Development ◽  
Information Management ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Distributed Resources ◽  
Future Research Directions ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

Complex new product development requires numerous decisions by many individuals and groups, which are often geographically and temporally distributed. There is a need to share and coordinate distributed resources and synchronize decisions, and recent advances in information technology (IT) pose an untapped potential for assisting in the capture, storage, retrieval and facilitated use of product development information. We exploit IT to address this problem through the proposed approach to Product Family Planning. By sharing assets such as components, processes and knowledge across a family of products, companies can efficiently develop differentiated products and increase the flexibility and responsiveness of their product realization process. In this paper we describe our recent efforts in realizing an information management infrastructure for product family planning and platform customization. In particular, we focus on three current research thrusts to identify product platform leveraging strategies to support future product family planning: (1) an evolutionary approach to product platforming, (2) a bottom-up approach to product platforming, and (3) industry-based platform case studies. Future research directions are also outlined.

scholarly journals Product design Lifecycle information model (PDLIM)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaojing Niu ◽  
Meili Wang ◽  
Shengfeng Qin
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Main Product ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Information Model ◽  
Design Environment ◽  
Product Lifecycle ◽  
Design And Development ◽  
Design Information ◽  
Role Modelling ◽  
Design Paradigm

Abstract In the era of Industry 4.0, in response to rapidly changing market and customer needs, product design and development (PDD) is evolving into a human-centred and data-driven design paradigm. The design environment gets more open often involving crowdsourcing and the design process becomes more complex, considering product family design along product whole lifecycle development, and needing more data support. Therefore, it is critical to effectively capture, share, and manage design-related information in such a complex design environment. From this perspective, it is a prerequisite to have a proper product design lifecycle information model (PDLIM) to guide information gathering, sharing and managing. To the best of our knowledge, currently, there lacks such a PDLIM to support effective product design and development (PDD), though digital twin (DT) technology shows a great potential of supporting product lifecycle information collection and management. In this paper, the overall structure of the proposed PDLIM is firstly developed to frame in all main product lifecycle stages and the corresponding key phases for structurally capturing and storing necessary data along a product lifecycle. Secondly, key design information items against the main product lifecycle stages and their corresponding key phases are explored from literature reviews and case study analyses. Thirdly, the necessity of the identified information items in the PDLIM is qualitatively evaluated by two case studies. Finally, the PDLIM is further evaluated by applying formal object-role modelling (ORM) to demonstrate how design information items are used and interacted in exemplary design interaction scenarios, and to approve that it can be formally described and managed as an information model. The evaluation results show that the PDLIM is feasible to be adapted in a crowdsourcing-combined PDD process for supporting design management, reviewing, quality control, and next round product redesign and improvement.

An Information Model for Finding and Integrating Distributed Resources for Engineering Design-Manufacturing Processes

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahul Kulkarni ◽  
David Rosen ◽  
Janet K. Allen ◽  
Farrokh Mistree
Keyword(s):  
Core Competencies ◽  
Information Model ◽  
Distributed Resources ◽  
Web Based ◽  
External Resources ◽  
Complementary Design ◽  
Engineering Parameters ◽  
The Right ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

The complexity of many modern products means that multiple design teams need to collaborate during product development projects. Driven by such issues, companies are increasingly staffing only their core competencies in-house and depending on other firms to provide the complementary design knowledge and design effort needed for a complete product. With the advent of the Internet, it is today possible that these external resources are physically, geographically, and temporally distributed. In this scenario, finding the right external resource for a given task and establishing effective communication between such resources are two of the most crucial elements of the product realization process. Through this paper, the authors aim to develop an information model and middleware that enable identification and use of suitable resources for design and design-for-manufacture stages in a distributed design and manufacturing environment. Such an information model and middleware will enable a designer to use XML to effectively communicate information regarding requirements, engineering parameters, process details and resource capabilities to different entities in the product realization process. The information model and middleware developed are implemented as part of Web-DPR – web-based distributed product realization environment developed at the Systems Realization Laboratory at Georgia Tech.

scholarly journals Product family design knowledge representation, aggregation, reuse, and analysis

2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
JYOTIRMAYA NANDA ◽  
HENRI J. THEVENOT ◽  
TIMOTHY W. SIMPSON ◽  
ROBERT B. STONE ◽  
MATT BOHM ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Product Design ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Database Schema ◽  
Design Knowledge ◽  
Formal Concept ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Management Framework ◽  
Design Information

A flexible information model for systematic development and deployment of product families during all phases of the product realization process is crucial for product-oriented organizations. In current practice, information captured while designing products in a family is often incomplete, unstructured, and is mostly proprietary in nature, making it difficult to index, search, refine, reuse, distribute, browse, aggregate, and analyze knowledge across heterogeneous organizational information systems. To this end, we propose a flexible knowledge management framework to capture, reorganize, and convert both linguistic and parametric product family design information into a unified network, which is called a networked bill of material (NBOM) using formal concept analysis (FCA); encode the NBOM as a cyclic, labeled graph using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) that designers can use to explore, search, and aggregate design information across different phases of product design as well as across multiple products in a product family; and analyze the set of products in a product family based on both linguistic and parametric information. As part of the knowledge management framework, a PostgreSQL database schema has been formulated to serve as a central design repository of product design knowledge, capable of housing the instances of the NBOM. Ontologies encoding the NBOM are utilized as a metalayer in the database schema to connect the design artifacts as part of a graph structure. Representing product families by preconceived common ontologies shows promise in promoting component sharing, and assisting designers search, explore, and analyze linguistic and parametric product family design information. An example involving a family of seven one-time-use cameras with different functions that satisfy a variety of customer needs is presented to demonstrate the implementation of the proposed framework.

Development of a Framework for Web-Based Product Platform Customization

2003 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Karthikeyan Umapathy ◽  
Jyotirmaya Nanda ◽  
Sachin Halbe ◽  
Barry Hodge
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Important Distinction ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Customer Involvement ◽  
Development Costs ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

Product customization is a value-added activity that can significantly increase sales by increasing customer satisfaction. Many companies are using product platforms to increase product variety and customization while reducing development costs and time-to-market. While flooding the market with a variety of products may satisfy some customers by providing a substitute for customization, variety is not customization. This subtle, yet important, distinction between variety and customization motivates the need for investigating technologies to facilitate customer involvement during the product realization process, and our focus in this paper is on web-based platform customization strategies enabled by recent advances in information technology. Towards that end, we describe the development of an interactive web-based platform customization framework as an extension of product family design and present a prototype that has been created as part of on-going research with a company that produces customized refiner plates for pulp and paper processing. While the utility of the proposed web-based framework is demonstrated in the context of customizing a refiner plate design, the proposed framework is applicable to a variety of engineered products and enhances customer interaction during the product realization process while reducing design and manufacturing lead-time for custom orders.

scholarly journals Design of Personalized Devices—The Tradeoff between Individual Value and Personalization Workload

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Juliane Kuhl ◽  
Andreas Ding ◽  
Ngoc Tuan Ngo ◽  
Andres Braschkat ◽  
Jens Fiehler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Customer Value ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Treatment Success ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Flow Diverter ◽  
New Method ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Value

Personalized medical devices adapted to the anatomy of the individual promise greater treatment success for patients, thus increasing the individual value of the product. In order to cater to individual adaptations, however, medical device companies need to be able to handle a wide range of internal processes and components. These are here referred to collectively as the personalization workload. Consequently, support is required in order to evaluate how best to target product personalization. Since the approaches presented in the literature are not able to sufficiently meet this demand, this paper introduces a new method that can be used to define an appropriate variety level for a product family taking into account standardized, variant, and personalized attributes. The new method enables the identification and evaluation of personalizable attributes within an existing product family. The method is based on established steps and tools from the field of variant-oriented product design, and is applied using a flow diverter—an implant for the treatment of aneurysm diseases—as an example product. The personalization relevance and adaptation workload for the product characteristics that constitute the differentiating product properties were analyzed and compared in order to determine a tradeoff between customer value and personalization workload. This will consequently help companies to employ targeted, deliberate personalization when designing their product families by enabling them to factor variety-induced complexity and customer value into their thinking at an early stage, thus allowing them to critically evaluate a personalization project.

SHARP: A System for Haptic Assembly and Realistic Prototyping

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhishek Seth ◽  
Hai-Jun Su ◽  
Judy M. Vance
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Prototyping ◽  
Mechanical Assembly ◽  
Swept Volumes ◽  
Physically Based ◽  
Product Design Process ◽  
Costly Product ◽  
Easy Integration ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

Virtual Reality (VR) technology holds promise as a virtual prototyping tool for mechanical assembly; however, several developmental challenges still need to be addressed before virtual prototyping applications can successfully be integrated into the product realization process. This paper describes the development of SHARP (System for Haptic Assembly & Realistic Prototyping), a portable VR interface for virtual assembly. SHARP uses physically-based modeling for simulating realistic part-to-part and hand-to-part interactions in virtual environments. A dual handed haptic interface for realistic part interaction using the PHANToM® haptic devices is presented. The capability of creating subassemblies enhances the application’s ability to handle a wide variety of assembly scenarios. Swept volumes are implemented for addressing maintainability issues and a network module is added for communicating with different VR systems at dispersed geographic locations. Support for various types of VR systems allows an easy integration of SHARP into the product realization process resulting in faster product development, faster identification of assembly and design issues and a more efficient and less costly product design process.

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