For products with a myriad of systems, groups of specialised engineers develop entire technical subsystems , and great effort is needed to integrate these systems for fulfilling the product's intended properties describing its purposeful behaviour. This way of developing products gets even more complex when using a mass customisation strategy because standard designs (reusable modules) have to be designed to fit a range of products. This product development setup requires that engineers working in different technical domains collaborate and are able to share information in a unified way. This article presents a visual design tool-the Interface diagram-which aims to support the engineering process of developing modularity in complex product systems. The tool is a model of a product system representing the arrangement of its elements and their interfaces. The tool has similar characteristics to a high-level product architecture model, aiming at supporting integration of technical subsystems by documenting interfaces and interactions among components from different functional subsystems and among different physical modules. One of the objectives for using the design tool is to support the activity of decomposing a product system into modules consisting of components developed by different engineering teams. The usefulness of the Interface diagram has been tested in an industrial development project showing positive results of shortening the lead time and minimising rework. Moreover, the Interface diagram has been used in interplay with a broader Product Lifecycle Management system. This allows the product structures from the Interface diagram to be enriched with detailed product documentation like computer-aided design, requirements, view models, design specifications and interface descriptions.
Abstract. In this paper we describe a language and method for deriving ontologies and ordering databases. The ontological structures arrived at are distributive lattices with attribution operations that preserve ∨, ∧ and ⊥. The preservation of ∧ allows the attributes to model the natural join operation in databases. We start by introducing ontological frameworks and knowledge bases and define the notion of a solution of a knowledge base. The import of this definition is that it specifies under what condition all information relevant to the domain of interest is present and it allows us to prove that a knowledge base always has a smallest, or terminal, solution. Though universal or initial solutions almost always are infinite in this setting with attributes, the terminal solution is finite in many cases. We describe a method for computing terminal solutions and give some conditions for termination and non-termination. The approach is predominantly coalgebraic, using Priestley duality, and calculations are made in the terminal coalgebra for the category of bounded distributive lattices with attribution operations.
Abstract. The goal of this paper is to determine the role of a product architecture model to support communication and to form the basis for developing and maintaining information of product structures in a PLM system. This paper contains descriptions of a modelling tool to represent a product architecture in a company to support the development of a family of products, as well as the reasons leading to the use of the specific model and its terminology. The fundamental idea for using the architecture model is that an improved understanding of the whole product system, will lead to better decision making. Moreover, it is discussed how the sometimes intangible elements and phenomena within an architecture model can be visually modeled in order to form the basis for a data model in a PLM system.
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