Concurrent Engineering

Today, three conditions are crucial for a company to be competitive on the market: quality, reduced time and low costs for the development of new products. The paper shows how companies developing new products (NPD) for the market can successfully implement concurrent engineering as an improvement of project management, in order to reduce product development time and costs and to ensure the quality expected by customers. The methodology presented in this paper is based on three main pillars of knowledge: project management, teamwork and concurrent engineering. The methodology provides a step-by-step guideline for the introduction of concurrent engineering in a company. This paper also presents the results of 10 Slovenian companies where this methodology has been tested on 20 pilot projects. The results show that managed projects upgraded with the principles of concurrent engineering lead to cost reduction, shorter development time and fewer discrepancies.

To meet a wide range of customer needs, a variety of product concepts can be modeled employing a platform approach. Whereas frequent market changes can be accommodated by dynamically modifying product concepts in iterations, capabilities in production are seldom well incorporated as part of design iterations. In this paper, a dynamic platform modeling approach that supports concurrent product-production reconfiguration is presented. The approach builds on Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) processes and a function modeling technique is used to represent product-production variety streams inherent in a production operation model. To demonstrate the approach, a comprehensive case from the aerospace industry is presented. Conceptual representations of a set of aero engine sub-systems and a variety of welding configurations, including their inherent constraints, are mutually modeled and assessed. The results show that a set of product-production alternatives can be dynamically controlled by integrating product-production constraints using a production operation model. Following SBCE processes, inferior alternatives can be put aside until new information becomes available and a new set of alternatives can be reconfigured. The dynamics and concurrency of the approach can potentially reduce the risk of late and costly modifications that propagate from design to production.

Decision-making on design features such as specifications and components is an essential aspect of new product development. Customers product preferences and their variations provide the basis of design features decision. Big data of product sales are an emerging source for the obtaining of customers preferences on product features. In this work, a machine learning-based design features decision support tool is proposed through big sales data analysis. Customers preferred product features and their combinations are predicted based on the sales data. Physical feasibility of the product features combinations is considered for customers preference analysis. Cluster analysis method is proposed to identify common and alternative design of product features. Based on specification/component relationships, design features decisions of product components are carried out by grouping product component into noncritical, common, and alternative components. A case study on electric toy cars was included to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Product development companies collect data in form of Engineering Change Requests for logged design issues, tests, and product iterations. These documents are rich in unstructured data (e.g. free text). Previous research affirms that product developers find that current IT systems lack capabilities to accurately retrieve relevant documents with unstructured data. In this research, we demonstrate a method using Natural Language Processing and document clustering algorithms to find structurally or contextually related documents from databases containing Engineering Change Request documents. The aim is to radically decrease the time needed to effectively search for related engineering documents, organize search results, and create labeled clusters from these documents by utilizing Natural Language Processing algorithms. A domain knowledge expert at the case company evaluated the results and confirmed that the algorithms we applied managed to find relevant document clusters given the queries tested.

In the conceptual design phase of eco-products, the evaluation of products eco-design is often considered by designers after determining the design scheme. In order to improve the eco-design efficiency, a CAD-based feedback knowledge push method was proposed to meet the designer’s eco-design knowledge requirements. Combine with the designer knowledge background, classified eco-design knowledge, and decomposed design tasks, eco-design knowledge requirements of designers can be obtained. Based on the cosine similarity algorithm of the knowledge vector space model (VSM), the knowledge requirements of the designer and the knowledge in the knowledge database are matched, and the eco-knowledge is actively pushed to the designer. The feedback and evaluation of designers on the initial push of knowledge was recorded by the system. When the designer is assigned relevant eco-design tasks again, the system conducts secondary filtering of eco-design knowledge through previous feedback records and pushes the filtered knowledge to designers, so as to achieve accurate feedback knowledge push. A CAD-based eco-design knowledge push prototype system for automotive products is developed. The eco-design of the front-end module of the automotive is used as an example to verify the effectiveness of the above method.

Due to the current and highly competitive industrial scenario, the technology-oriented organizations have been making routine adjustments to the conventional IPDP, in order to seek more profitable business models. Identifying the product functions, as well as its importance - perceived by the consumer - and being able to associate this information with manufacturability and assembly aspects, is fundamental to achieve more competitive, low-cost and higher quality products. This article objective is to evaluate this method concept, applying it in an industrial project. In order to assess the method within the complete integrated product development process (IPDP), the activities related to the conceptual and preliminary phases of the project delineated this article limits. This study selected a subgroup of the white goods industry, where first the traditional models of VE were applied in the conceptual design phase. Subsequently, the classic DFA models were applied in the preliminary design phase. Thus, it was possible to apply the proposed iterative method, where the alternatives generated with the DFA were cyclically re-evaluated, function by function, in the previous stage of value analysis. With this, this study came to the method assessment, its gains and limitations. Then, the original design was compared with the solution after the proposal application, without the method used. Finally, this study verified the influence of the method on the balance between the value and the cost of each function, in addition to the direct comparison of the solution final cost with the version without the method application. Among the results, this article presents a report showing the method viability, its particularities, impacts, and limitations.

With the continuous upgrading of the manufacturing system, the assembly line balancing problem (ALBP) is gradually complicated, and the researches are constantly deepened in the application theory and solution methods. In order to clarify the research direction and development status of assembly line balancing, 89 articles are read and studied. We classify ALBPs to construct the network structure of research from horizontal classification and vertical thinking. The ALBP framework is horizontally given according to the number of models (i.e. the number of products), the layout shape of the assembly line, and the data of task time. The “seven steps for scientific paper” is vertically proposed according to the research steps to comb the research path of scientific and technological literature. The horizontal and vertical extension crosses and constructs the network structure of the ALBP. Any horizontal problem intersects with any step of the vertical “seven steps for scientific paper” to form a research point. We analyze 89 articles according to the development path from the straight line to U-shaped line and then to two-sided U-shaped/parallel U-shaped assembly line, summarize the research algorithm of assembly line balance and count the number of articles, and point out the latest research direction and algorithm development trend of assembly line balance.