Management of design activities in a concurrent engineering environment

Pourbabai, Behnam; Pecht, Michael

doi:10.1080/00207549408956973

Cited by 11 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 6 publications

(5 reference statements)

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“…A second stream of research has been dedicated to organizationa l and management problems. Among them, the structuring of design activities and of development teams in large-scale projects (Kusiak and Park 1990, Kusiak and Wang 1993, Kim and O' Grady 1996, resource scheduling (Pourbabai andPecht 1994, Nkasu andLeung 1997), and the development of an appropriate information infrastructure (Harding and Popplewell 1996).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Product and process design effort allocation in concurrent engineering

Cantamessa¹,

Villa²

2000

International Journal of Production Research

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Concurrent engineering has become a popular approach to product development among manufacturing companies. A lively debate has recently arisen upon whether the technique may be conveniently applied under all circumstances, or whether, in some cases, it may be inferior to other approaches, including the traditional sequential one. The paper proposes an analytical model of concurrent engineering and shows that the main, although not the only, determinants in suggesting the optimal allocation of product and process design e ort are thè evolution speeds' of product and process parameters. Evolution speed indicates whether the major part of design uncertainty is reduced early or late in the design process and, among other factors, is related to the problem's innovative content. It is eventually found that concurrent engineering is optimal in the case of routine design and when the process characteristics are not critical. Under other circumstances other three patterns, termed`sequential',`process ® rst' and`co-operative R&D' , appear to be superior. IntroductionUntil less than a decade ago, the dominant approach to product development in manufacturing ® rms was purely sequential. The chain of activities starting from product planning, and leading to product design, process design and, ® nally, production, was managed as a strict succession of tasks. Each activity was assigned to a corresponding function (i.e. marketing, design department, process planning o ce, shop¯oor), and jobs completed by each upstream function were simply passed`over the wall' to the downstream o ce. The roots of such a kind of organization can be traced back to the turn of this century, when specialization and division of labour were the techniques of choice when pursuing e ciency (Dasu and Eastman 1994: pp. viii± xv). However, because of their iterative nature, the sequential approach does not suit design and development activities very well. The division between upstream and downstream activities is conceptually appealing but, in reality, all design tasksÐ product and process design in particularÐ are strongly interdependent. If a designer ignores the downstream implications of his or her design choices, he is bound to rework his results several times, thus reducing overall e ciency and increasing development time.As a ® rst step to solving such problems, the design review approach was proposed, in which meetings are organized at di erent steps of the development process. In such meetings, representatives from di erent functions examine and criticize intermediate design results from the perspective of downstream development activities, together with basic functionality and compliance to speci® cations. Between the

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Product and process design effort allocation in concurrent engineering

Cantamessa¹,

Villa²

2000

International Journal of Production Research

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“…By substituting Equation (5) and Equation (6) into Equation (4) It can be seen that the two-attribute satisfactory function can be completely defined if only the value of coefficient k. is determined. Usually in utility analysis, coefficient kz is determined based on a concept of certainty equivalence using lotteries [20], but not here.…”

Section: Two-attribute Satisfactory Functionmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…By substituting Equation (8) and the relations of s, (by) = 0.5 and S2 (bJ = 0.5, Coefficient kz is obtained by solving the foregoing equation. After obtaining coefficient kz, the other coefficients and kyz can be determined using Equations (5) and (6).…”

Section: Two-attribute Satisfactory Functionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Product Design Based on Concurrent Processing of Design and Manufacturing Information by Utility Analysis

Yoshimura

Kondo

1996

Concurrent Engineering

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A methodology for concurrent decision making of factors concerning product designs and product manufacturing is proposed for ob taining better product designs from a wider global viewpoint of the product performance and the product manufacturing cost according to the concept of concurrent engineering In this method first a function expressing the satisfactory level of the manufacturing division and a function expressing the satisfactory level of the design division are formulated for the product design being regarded Then an integrated higher ranking decision making utility function is formulated using these two satisfactory level functions by the utility analysis Next Pareto optimum solution sets of the two multiobjective optimization problems of maximization of the product performance and minimization of the product manufacturing cost are obtained for alternative product designs Finally on the Pareto optimum solution curves the values of the integrated satisfactory levels are obtained and the most preferable design solution is selected An applied example of this concurrent design procedure is given to demonstrate its effectiveness in comparison to a conventional design procedure Key Words: concurrent engineering design optimization product design util ty analysis multiobjective optimization concurrent design satisfactory function product performance manufacturing cost

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“…On the other hand, process planning function attempts to support design function with readily available information on how the process plans are made [5,22,40]. Many studies are reported on the design aspects of CE [3, 13,25,32,35,48,65,87].…”

Section: Design Support Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concurrent Engineering: An Overview from Manufacturing Engineering Perspectives

Zhang

1995

Concurrent Engineering

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In the last few years, Concurrent Engineering (CE) has become a very prevalent topic in the area of manufacturing engineering. It has been viewed as one of the most effective, potential, and miraculous cures for maintaining the winning position of the American manufacturing industry in global competition. However, because CE is such a comprehensive topic which covers a wide spectrum of areas of study, there is a need to clarify the up-to-date research activities and industrial applications in the manufacturing engineering area. This paper first discusses the history and essence of CE, and then overviews seven areas of CE study in the manufacturing engineering perspective, as well as several industrial applications of CE. Because the studies on CE are still evolving, this paper aims to stimulate further explorations by providing a thorough survey on both theoretical and application research efforts in the past decade.

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Management of design activities in a concurrent engineering environment

Cited by 11 publications

References 6 publications

Product and process design effort allocation in concurrent engineering

Product and process design effort allocation in concurrent engineering

Product Design Based on Concurrent Processing of Design and Manufacturing Information by Utility Analysis

Concurrent Engineering: An Overview from Manufacturing Engineering Perspectives

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