A lattice-based approach for navigating design configuration spaces

Abstract

Design configurations, such as Bills of Materials (BoMs), are indispensable parts of any product development process and integral to the design descriptions stored in proprietary Computer Aided Design and Product Lifecycle Management systems. Engineers use BoMs and other design configurations as lenses to repurpose design descriptions for specific purposes. For this reason, multiple BoMs typically occur in any given product development process. For example, an engineering BoM may be used to define a configuration that best supports a design activity whereas a manufacturing BoM may be used to define the configuration of parts that best supports a manufacturing process. Current practice for the definition of BoMs involves the use of indented parts lists and dendograms that are prone to error because it is easy to create discrepancies across BoMs that, in essence, are defined through collections of part identifiers such as names and part numbers. Such errors have a significant detrimental effect on the performance of product development processes by creating the need for rework, adding costs and increasing time to market. This paper introduces a design description capability that ensures consistency across BoMs for a given design. A boolean hypercube lattice is used to define a design configuration space that includes all possible configurations for a given design description. Valid operations within the space are governed by the mathematics of hypercube lattices. The design description capability is demonstrated through an early engineering design configuration software tool that offers significant benefits by ensuring consistency across the BoMs for a given design. The software uses and generates design descriptions that are exported from and imported to commercially available design systems through a standard (ISO 10303-214) interface format. In this way, potential for early impact on industry practice is high.

A Data Management Approach Based on Product Morphology in Product Lifecycle Management

“…The integration of multi-stage data is another research focus. Product plan-BOM (Bill Of Material), design-BOM, craft-BOM, stock-BOM, manufacture-BOM, finance-BOM, customer-BOM, and after service-BOM, is integrated to supply a single data source by developing a data flow [21,22]. Li uses data domains integrating a concept design domain, a structural design domain, a detailed design domain, a process planning domain, a manufacturing domain and a sales and service domain by mapping [3].…”

Maintaining Consistency Across Design Descriptions in Engineering Product Development

“…It can be seen that there is some overlap between these operations, e.g., consolidation can be implemented using a factorisation operation on selected sub-parts, but the need for this range of operations was established by experimenting with case study BoMs. These operations are compared with those of Zhou et al (2018), Dement et al (2001) and McKay et al (2019) in Table 2.…”

“…Managing change: where the goal is to ensure that the correct versions of the parts of a product are combined to form the final design (Jarratt et al 2011);  Managing product variety: where the goal is to ensure that the correct variants of the parts of a product family are combined to form a final product that reflects the options and features selected by a customer (Johannesson et al 2017;Raja and Isaksson 2019); and  Enhancing downstream processes: where the goal is to provide design descriptions tailored to support the needs of specific lifecycle processes such as manufacturing or maintenance and repair (Stonebraker 1996;Zhou et al 2018;McKay et al 2019). In practice, all three functionalities are needed because all designs (variant or not) are subject to change and downstream processes benefit from design descriptions that are structured to suit the task in hand and whose information content is minimal, complete and correct for the intended purpose.…”