Recent changes in the product creation process have shown reductions in design and manufacturing time and costs due to the introduction of new manufacturing philosophies, and computer based methods. Major improvements have also been found in the distribution phase by use of sophisticated logistic scheduling and monitoring systems. However reductions in delivery costs and times look set to be re...

When an artifact is designed nowadays the typical output of this activity includes blueprints, CAD files, manufacturing plans and other documents describing the final result of a long series of deliberations and tradeoffs by the participants of concurrent engineering (CE) teams. The underlying intent and logical support (i.e.therationale ) for the decisions captured therein is usually lost, or ...

Concurrent Engineering requires the cooperation of people coming from different phases of the engineering process. Traceability between the different views (products), which exist in such cross-functional teams, is essential for enabling mutual understanding. Moreover, the different views must be related to each other and must be presented in a suitable way to support finding and resolving of i...

In this paper DECOR, a conngurable integrated design ow mangement component that provides online monitoring and control of concurrent design processes, is described. Manipulations of data objects with arbitrary granularity from les or directories down to single structures can be considered. DECOR is based on extended Predicate Transition Nets as modelling paradigm.

Design of large made-to-order products invariably involves design activities which are increasingly being distributed globally in order to reduce costs, gain competitive advantage and utilise external expertise and resources. Designers specialise within their domain producing solutions to design problems using the tools and techniques with which they are familiar. They possess a relatively loca...

(SBCE) by reasoning, developing, and communicating about sets of solutions in parallel and relatively independently (see Figure 1). As the design progresses, they gradually narrow their respective sets of solutions based on additional information from development, testing, the customer, and other participants’ sets. As they narrow, they commit to staying within the set(s), barring extreme circu...

The development of space systems involves complex interdisciplinary systems engineering. The concurrent engineering (CE) approach has been successfully applied to the early design phase of space missions. To bridge the gap between the development phases and between the different domain experts, a model based system engineering (MBSE) approach is showing promising results. To support CE and MBSE...

Product design is the most important stage in the course of product development. All the important decision-making regarding manufacturing and assembly is made during this period. Concurrent Engineering (CE) has been proposed to facilitate the whole development processes by using multi-disciplinary team-work. Under the concept of CE there is a need to provide the designers an expert system to i...

A customer-oriented product designer must rely on many types of information, including customer-product requirements and design developments in the related fields. Concurrent engineering applications in product design problems will help designers to systematically consider relevant design information and make the most effective use of the time they devoted to the design process. Even though man...

Nippondenso Co. Ltd. (NDCL) is Japan's foremost manufacturer of automotive components. It faces the challenge of manufacturing massproduction-volume products in unpredictable model mix in order to meet the high variety Just In Time (JIT) production requirements of its customers, notably Toyota. Over the past 25 years it has increased its ability to meet this challenge and indeed has made the co...