Showing papers on "Product design specification published in 2006"

Product platform and product family design: Methods and applications

Abstract: Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Front-End Issues Related to Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Effective Product Platform Planning in the Front End.- Platform-Driven Development of Product Families.- Platform Concept Evaluation.- Platform Leveraging Strategies and Market Segmentation.- Product Family Positioning.- Commonality Indices for Assessing Product Families.- Optimization Methods to Support Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Methods for Optimizing Product Platforms and Product Families.- Commonality Decisions in Product Family Design.- Product Variety Optimization.- Analytical Target Cascading in Product Family Design.- Determining Product Platform Extent.- Back-End Issues Related to Platform-Based Product Family Development.- A Roadmap for Product Architecture Costing.- An Activity-Based Costing Method to Support Product Family Design.- Product Family Redesign Using a Platform Approach.- Process Platform and Production Configuration for Product Families.- Measuring Shape Commonality.- Process Parameter Platform Design to Manage Workstation Capacity.- Applications of Platform-Based Product Family Development.- Ice Scraper Product Family Development at Innovation Factory.- Architecting and Implementing Profitable Product Families and Shared Engineering Platforms.- A Case Study of the Product Design Generator.- Product Platform Management Practice at Cetetherm.

Product lifecycle management

Abstract: Manufacturers are faced with many challenges, such as globalization, disparate enterprise systems and a lack of platform maturity. These will only multiply as technology advances, offshore manufacturing increases and new ways of working emerge. To overcome these challenges, many manufacturers have embraced product lifecycle management (PLM) or have expanded the use of PLM processes and tools to manage product data effi ciently, with increased visibility and control over the life cycle of the product.

A Kansei mining system for affective design

Abstract: Affective design has received much attention from both academia and industries. It aims at incorporating customers' affective needs into design elements that deliver customers' affective satisfaction. The main challenge for affective design originates from difficulties in mapping customers' subjective impressions, namely Kansei, to perceptual design elements. This paper intends to develop an explicit decision support to improve the Kansei mapping process by reusing knowledge from past sales records and product specifications. As one of the important applications of data mining, association rule mining lends itself to the discovery of useful patterns associated with the mapping of affective needs. A Kansei mining system is developed to utilize valuable affect information latent in customers' impressions of existing affective designs. The goodness of association rules is evaluated according to their achievements of customers' expectations. Conjoint analysis is applied to measure the expected and achieved utilities of a Kansei mapping relationship. Based on goodness evaluation, mapping rules are further refined to empower the system with useful inference patterns. The system architecture and implementation issues are discussed in detail. An application of Kansei mining to mobile phone affective design is presented.

Customer Requirement Management in Product Development: A Review of Research Issues

Abstract: The importance of customer requirement management in product development has been well-recognized in both academia and industry alike. This article provides a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research in this field. Customer requirement management entails various issues related to requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification, as well as the requirement management process. With respect to a holistic view of customer requirement management, key challenges and future research directions are identified.

Understanding the Impact of Collaboration Software on Product Design and Development

Abstract: Prior research suggests that supply chain collaboration has enabled companies to compete more efficiently in a global economy. We investigate a class of collaboration software for product design and development called collaborative product commerce (CPC). Drawing on prior research in media richness theory and organizational science, we develop a theoretical framework to study the impact of CPC on product development. Based on data collected from 71 firms, we test our research hypotheses on the impact of CPC on product design quality, design cycle time, and development cost. We find that CPC implementation is associated with greater collaboration among product design teams. This collaboration has a significant, positive impact on product quality and reduces cycle time and product development cost. Further analyses reveal that CPC implementation is associated with substantial cost savings that can be attributed to improvements in product design quality, design turnaround time, greater design reuse, and lower product design documentation and rework costs.

Balancing Marketing and Manufacturing Objectives in Product Line Design

Abstract: The product development process involves communication and compromise among interacting and often competing objectives from marketing, design, and manufacturing perspectives. Methods for negotiating these perspectives play an important role in the process. For example, design for manufacturing (DFM) analyses aim to incorporate manufacturing requirements into product design decision making to reduce product complexity and cost, which generally increases profitability. However, when design characteristics have market consequences, it is important to quantify explicitly the tradeoffs between the reduced cost and reduced revenue resulting from designs that are less expensive to manufacture but also less desirable in the marketplace. in this article we leverage existing models for coordinating marketing and design perspectives by incorporating quantitative models of manufacturing investment and production allocation. The resulting methodology allows a quantitative assessment of tradeoffs among product functionality, market performance, and manufacturing costs to achieve product line solutions with optimal profitability.

A rapid design process for Total Care Product creation

Abstract: Total Care Products are innovative packages consisting of hardware and services integrated to provide a complete functional provision. These types of products are becoming increasingly popular as companies strive to find new ways to ensure their business remains profitable and their products are attractive to customers. The Total Care Product creation process requires close collaboration between the customer and supplier as the two parties engage in an iterative, often time-consuming procedure involving needs, expectations and solutions exploration that ultimately leads to the creation of the functional product. This paper describes a novel design process for Total Care Product creation that seamlessly integrates hardware and service support by providing a robust design methodology and process support tool that firstly breaks down Total Care Product creation into distinct stages, and then the support structure is provided to facilitate the design and decision-making process at each stage in a rapid and si...

Coverage and adequacy in software product line testing

Abstract: Software product line modeling has received a great deal of attention for its potential in fostering reuse of software artifacts across development phases. Research on the testing phase, has focused on identifying the potential for reuse of test cases across product line instances. While this offers potential reductions in test development effort for a given product line instance, it does not focus on and leverage the fundamental abstraction that is inherent in software product lines - variability.In this paper, we illustrate how rich software product line modeling notations can be mapped onto an underlying relational model that captures variability in the feasible product line instances. This relational model serves as the semantic basis for defining a family of coverage criteria for testing of a product line. These criteria make it possible to accumulate test coverage information for the product line itself over the course of multiple product line instance development efforts. Cumulative coverage, in turn, enables targeted testing efforts for new product line instances. We describe how combinatorial interaction testing methods can be applied to define test configurations that achieve a desired level of coverage and identify challenges to scaling such methods to large, complex software product lines.

Software Product Line Engineering with the UML: Deriving Products

Abstract: Software product line engineering introduces two new dimensions into the traditional engineering of software-based systems: the variability modeling and the product derivation. The variability gathers characteristics that differ from one product to another, while the product derivation is defined as a complete process of building products from the product line. Software Product Line Engineering with the UML has received a lot of attention in recent years. However most of these works only concern variability modeling in UML static models and few works concern behavioral models . In addition, there is very little research on product derivation. This chapter investigates the product derivation in the context of the product line engineering with the UML. First, a set of extensions are proposed to model product line variability in two types of UML mo dels: class diagrams (t he static aspect) and sequence diagrams (the behavioral aspect). Then we formalize product derivation using a UML model transformation. An algorithm is give n to derive a static model for a product and an algebraic approach is proposed to derive product-specific statecharts from the sequence diagrams of the product line. Two simple case studies are presented, based on a Mercure product line and the banking product line, to illustrate the overall process, from the modeling of the product line to the product derivation.

Understanding customer satisfaction in product customization

Abstract: Product customization has been recognized as an effective means to meet individual customers’ needs. It is imperative to assist customers in making informed decisions with regard to company capabilities and the added value of customization. Customer value analysis not only empowers customers to express their preferences for various product features explicitly, but it also facilitates the company’s justification of different customization solutions. This paper analyzes diverse elements of product quality in relation to customization and introduces utility functions to quantify the customer-perceived value in terms of the quality utility per unit cost and the ratio of marginal utility to marginal cost. Adaptive conjoint analysis is employed to capture the utility function of product quality with respect to many specific product features. With quantitative analysis of quality utility, customers can be actively involved in the product customization process. Product marketing and design engineering are coordinated through the product family architecture, enabling the convergence of customers’ needs to product offerings of the company. Also reported is a case study of customizing power supply design for a telecommunications system.

A feature-oriented approach to developing dynamically reconfigurable products in product line engineering

Abstract: Dynamic product reconfiguration refers to making changes to a deployed product configuration while a system is running. Recently, there have been increasing demands for dynamic product reconfiguration in various application areas (e.g., ubiquitous computing, self-healing systems, etc.); however, most product line engineering methods in the literature have focused on the development of reusable core assets for statically configured products. In this paper, we propose a feature-oriented approach to develop dynamically reconfigurable core assets. This approach takes feature binding analysis results as a key design driver for identifying and managing variation points of dynamically reconfigurable products. We also provide a conceptual model for a reconfigurator, which monitors and manages product reconfiguration at run time. The method is illustrated with a home service robot product line example.

Integrating data mining and rough set for customer group-based discovery of product configuration rules

Abstract: Product configuration design is of critical importance in design for mass customization. This paper will investigate two important issues in configuration design. The first issue is requirement configuration and a dependency analysis approach is proposed and implemented to link customer groups with clusters of product specifications. The second issue concerns the engineering configuration and it is modelled as an association relation between clusters of product specifications and configuration alternatives. A novel methodology and architecture are proposed for accomplishing the two configuration tasks and bridging the gap between them. This methodology is based on integration of popular data mining approaches (such as fuzzy clustering and association rule mining) and variable precision rough set. It focuses on the discovery of configuration rules from the purchased products according to customer groups. The proposed methodology is illustrated with a case study of an electrical bicycle.

Platform-based product design and development: A knowledge-intensive support approach

Abstract: This paper presents a knowledge-intensive support paradigm for platform-based product family design and development. The fundamental issues underlying the product family design and development, including product platform and product family modeling, product family generation and evolution, and product family evaluation for customization, are discussed. A module-based integrated design scheme is proposed with knowledge support for product family architecture modeling, product platform establishment, product family generation, and product variant assessment. A systematic methodology and the relevant technologies are investigated and developed for knowledge supported product family design process. The developed information and knowledge-modeling framework and prototype system can be used for platform product design knowledge capture, representation and management and offer on-line support for designers in the design process. The issues and requirements related to developing a knowledge-intensive support system for modular platform-based product family design are also addressed.

Product Information Management for Mass Customization: Connecting Customer, Front-office and Back-office for Fast and Efficient Customization

Abstract: List of Figures List of Tables List of Cases Foreword Preface Reader's Guide PART I: PRODUCT CONFIGURATION Product Configuration: A New Approach to More Efficient Product Customization Configuration Process and Configurable Products Traditional Approaches to Configuration PART II: PRODUCT CONFIGURATION SYSTEMS Configuration Systems Architecture Commercial Product Modelling Technical Product Modelling Other Product Models PART III: SELECTION AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A CONFIGURATOR Configurators and Management Information Systems Selecting a Product Configurator Implementing a Configuration System PART IV: OPERATIONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL IMPLICATIONS OF A CONFIGURATION SYSTEM A Comprehensive View: The Sideco Case Study Configurational Approach: Aligning Product, Processes and Organization Systems Bibliography Index

The product avatar as a product-instance-centric information management concept

Abstract: This paper presents the concept of semi-autonomous product-centric information management based on the Product Avatar (PA) concept, discussing the overall concept of distributed and decentralised information management relevant to individual product items and analyses the requirements the concept generates. In that context, it aims at stimulating discussion on the pragmatic utilisation of emerging technologies, such as RFID, wireless networking and ubiquitous computing. This paper further illustrates the benefits of the application of the PA concept in examples related to PLM against a scenario based on a network of organisations connected to the maintenance, repair and operation processes of a product.

Software Product Lines: Research Issues in Engineering and Management

Abstract: Product Line Management.- A Scenario-Based Method for Software Product Line Architecting.- Strategic Scenario-Based Valuation of Product Line Roadmaps.- Experiences and Expectations Regarding the Introduction of Systematic Reuse in Small- and Medium-Sized Companies.- Product Line Requirements Engineering.- Capturing Product Line Information from Legacy User Documentation.- Scenario-Based Application Requirements Engineering.- Consolidated Product Line Variability Modeling.- Product Line Architecture.- Dealing with Architectural Variation in Product Populations.- A Software Product Line Reference Architecture for Security.- Architecture Reasoning for Supporting Product Line Evolution: An Example on Security.- A Method for Predicting Reliability and Availability at the Architecture Level.- Product Line Testing.- Product Line Use Cases: Scenario-Based Specification and Testing of Requirements.- System Testing of Product Lines: From Requirements to Test Cases.- The ScenTED Method for Testing Software Product Lines.- Specific Product Line Engineering Issues.- Incremental Systems Integration within Multidisciplinary Product Line Engineering Using Configuration Item Evolution Diagrams.- Software Product Line Engineering with the UML: Deriving Products.- Evaluation Framework for Model-Driven Product Line Engineering Tools.

A Configurable Component Framework Supporting Platform-Based Product Development

Abstract: Product development in the automotive industry is a challenging task for many reasons There is an ongoing globalization and a constant evolution in the relationships between the OEMs and their suppliers driving an almost constant stream of changes and new challenges to well-established organizations and companies During a long period of time the automotive industry has established more and more of a mass-customized approach to its business operations Customers require products to be almost individually tailored to their needs, expectations, and personalized statements On the other hand, the automotive industry strives minimize costs to be competitive and profitable Economy of scale from high volumes of common parts is a common approach to minimize product costs A complementary approach is reuse of existing parts whenever possible The combination of these factors drives a platform-based approach to product development The challenge is to maintain a capability to deliver customized products while reducing the number of unique components and design solutions needed for the customization Modularization and design for variety are approaches to create design solutions that can be used in such an environment to create the appropriate variety using a limited set of component This thesis argues for the need to introduce more capable product descriptions that can be used by all engineering disciplines and in a cross-functional teamwork during all lifecycle phases of the product Given the need for product variety the core product definition must include mechanisms to define and manage this variety and enable representation of all relevant product configurations The main contributions of the research lie in: • definition of the concept of configurable components that are presented as the elements and building blocks capable of providing the foundation for a next generation product description systems, • extension and linkage of existing design theories and methods (eg function-means modeling) with the proposed concept of configurable components that extends the current knowledge with mechanisms and methods to deal with variety, and • extension of the concept of configurable components to be used also for manufacturing system modeling with linkage between the product and the manufacturing system models The research presents an integrated framework for utilizing configurable product and manufacturing system models The concept of configurable components, the focus on appropriate design bandwidth, and the integrated framework will improve the capability develop high variety and platform-based products with a co-optimization of variety and commonality

Personalized recommendation system based on product specification values

Abstract: In this paper, we developed a recommendation system which enables bidirectional communication between the user and system using an utility range-based product recommendation algorithm in order to provide more dynamic and personalized recommendations. The system is based on an interactive procedure for recommending similar ones among the products of the collaborative companies that share the product taxonomy table. The main idea of the proposed procedure is using a multi-attribute decision making (MADM) to find the utility values of products in same product class of the companies. Based on the values, we determine what products are similar. The similar product recommendation system is a Web-based application system running on a PC. The system has a user-friendly graphic user interface to encode easily incomplete value judgments. Using the system, we carry out the experiments for performance evaluation of our procedure. The experimental study shows that the utility range-based approach is a viable solution to the similar product recommendation problems in the viewpoints of correct rate and satisfaction rate.

Satisfying Customer Preferences via Mass Customization and Mass Production

Abstract: Two operational formats namely mass customization and mass production can be implemented to satisfy customer preference-based demand. The mass customization system consists of two stages: the initial build-to-stock phase and the final customize-to-order phase. The mass production system has a single stage: building products with pre-determined specifications to stock. In each case, the company makes decisions on the number of initial product variants, product specifications, production quantities and product pricing. Under a uniform customer preference distribution, the optimal number of base-product variants resembles the well known economic order quantity solution, and the optimal product specifications are equally spaced. We characterize three possible benefits of mass customization: (i) the gained surplus from offering each customer her ideal product; (ii) extra revenue from price discrimination; and (iii) reduced costs due to risk pooling under stochastic demand.

Framework of a Product Lifecycle Costing System

Abstract: Today's competitive business environment imposes new challenges to manufacturing companies. For these companies to survive in this environment, implementing product lifecycle management (PLM) technologies with an emphasis on cost control is one valid approach. PLM is a strategic business approach that applies a consistent set of business solutions to help manufacturing companies manage all the activities related to a product in an integrated way across the lifecycle from customer need to product recycling and disposal. Product lifecycle cost is an important measure for PLM implementation. It can help track and analyze the financial information of activities associated with each phase of a product's lifecycle. The paper presents a framework of the product lifecycle costing system for supporting decision making, especially the decision making at very early stages of a product lifecycle. It can be used as a design support tool to help new product development. A number of methodologies and tools are developed in the system. The case based reasoning method is used to quickly build a new product model. The costs of product development processes related to the new product are calculated using activity based costing methods. Dynamic programming is then used to obtain an optimal set of product development processes with the objective of optimizing the overall product development cost. This system is built using object oriented modeling methods.

Advances in Design

Abstract: Part I: Next Generation Design Economic Growth, Business Innovation and Engineering Design Directions of Next Generation Product Development 'What-if' Design as an Integrative Method in Product Design Self Organization in Design Towards a Design Methodology for Self-optimizing Systems Part II: Design Knowledge and Functional Design Reusing Design Knowledge Structural and Functional Analysis for Assemblies Knowledge Management for a Cooperative Design System Part III: Innovative and Conceptual Design AdaptEx: Extending Product Life Cycles through Strategic Product Upgrades Product Genetic Engineering Gene Engineering-based Innovation of Manufactured Products Use of Constraint Programming for Design Model Infrastructures and Human Interaction in a Stereo Table Environment Inventive Design Applied to Injection Molding Part IV: Design Frameworks Supporting Problem Expression within a Co-evolutionary Design Framework A Four-stage Approximation Strategy for the Exploration of a Mechanical Concept A Framework of Product Styling Platform Using Case-based Styling Indexing A Systematic Design Approach for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems Crosstalk: Collaborative Framework for Electro-mechanical Product Design Integrated Architecture of Geometric Models and Design Intentions Part V: Design Management Management of Engineering Design Process in Collaborative Situation Requirements Management for the Extended Automotive Enterprise Federated Product Data Management in Multi-company Projects STEP PLCS for Design and In-service Product Data Management Value Chain Structure and Correlation Between DesignStructure Matrices Integration of Cost Models in Design and Manufacturing Part VI: Product Life Cycle Life Cycle Product Support in the Digital Age Total Quality Management and Process Modeling for PLM in SME Selection and Evaluation of PLM Tools for Competitive Product Development Part VII: Collaborative Engineering Design Efficient Product Data Sharing in Collaboration Life Cycles Design Iterations in a Geographically Distributed Design Process A Cluster-based Approach for Collaborative Design Process Analysis Workspaces and Cooperation Notions in the Design Process Pitfalls of Engineering Change - Change Practice during Complex Product Design Modeling of Manufacturing Process Complexity Human Modeling in Industrial Design Part VIII: Design Intent and Tolerancing On the Merging of Geometric Models Based on Hierarchical Context Haptic Virtual Prototyping for Design and Assessment of Gear-shifts Predicting Design Quality through Sensitivity Modeling Computer Aided Tolerancing - Solver and Post Processor Analysis A New Method for Integrated Design and Tolerancing Contact and Channel Model for Pairs of Working Surfaces Part IX: Modeling and Design for Manufacturing Manufacturing-driven Design of Sculptured Surfaces Extended Design for X for Digital Consumer Products Development of Integrated Design System for Structural Design of Machine Tools The Structured Design of a Reconfigurable Control Process

Classification of Product Requirements Based on Product Environment

Abstract: Effective management of product requirements is critical for designers to deliver a quality design solution in a reasonable range of cost and time The management depends on a well-defined classification and a flexible representation of product requirements This article proposes two classification criteria in terms of different partitions of product environment based on a formal structure of product requirements The first criterion classifies the product requirements by partitioning product environment in terms of the product life cycle whereas the second classifies them by partitioning the product environment into natural, built, and human environments A case study is used to show the feasibility of this approach This research is the core of a web-based distributed product management system