Methods for the capture of manufacture best practice in product lifecycle management

Abstract

Abstract:The capture of manufacturing best practice knowledge in product lifecycle management systems has significant potential to improve the quality of design decisions and minimise manufacturing problems during new product development. It should both support manufacturing engineers and offer designers an improved ability to understand the manufacturing consequences of alternative design options. However, providing a re-useable source of manufacturing best practice is difficult due to the complexity of the viewpoint relationships between products and the manufacturing processes and resources used to produce them. This paper reports on an industrial exploration of this problem combined with the application of modelling methods which support the capture of relationship knowledge during system design.The paper discusses the analysis of a number of component products and their manufacturing methods in order to identify how best to organise manufacturing best practice knowledge, the relationships between elements of this knowledge plus their relationship to product information. The representation of such complex relationships during system design typically causes problems as traditional system design tools such as UML do not readily support the capture of other than simple relationships between different information classes. This paper also explores the application of UML-2 as a system design tool which can model these relationships and hence support the reuse of system design models over time.The paper identifies a set of part family and feature libraries and, most significantly, the relationships between them, as a means of capturing best practice manufacturing knowledge and illustrates how these can be linked to manufacturing resource models and product information. The viewpoint relationships between part families and features are captured during system design using UML-2 thereby supporting the long term re-use of the knowledge as systems are developed and new systems come on line. Design for manufacture and machining best practice views are used in the paper to illustrate the concepts developed. An experimental knowledge based system has been developed and results generated using a power transmission shaft example.

A framework for developing engineering design ontologies within the aerospace industry

“…There is no widely adopted approach or standard for ontology development, and there is lack of practical ontology methods for supporting the engineering design process (Darlington and Culley 2008;Lim, Liu, and Lee 2011). The literature has identified that many of the ontology development attempts in product design are commonly technology oriented (Kim, Manley, and Yang 2006;Gunendran and Young 2009;Bock et al 2010;Chungoora and Young 2010;Panetto, Dassisti, and Tursi 2012). There is lack of research projects focused on bridging the gap between ontology-based frameworks and engineering design activities.…”

The reuse of machining knowledge to improve designer awareness through the configuration of knowledge libraries in PLM

“…design viewpoints and manufacturing viewpoints. Three good examples of this are Fenves et al (2005), Gunendran and Young (2010) and Chungoora et al (2013). Relationships between a design feature and a design function or design part family are explored by Chungoora et al (2013).…”

“…Over the past few years there has been an emphasis placed upon the study and development of knowledge based systems to enable better knowledge management and reuse of that knowledge within manufacturing environments (Cochrane et al 2009;Gunendran and Young 2010;Chungoora et al 2013). There are some drawbacks to these approaches in that they can consume inordinate amounts of time to create a knowledge base and test it before they are even implemented within a commercial environment (Mohammed, May and Alavi 2008).…”

“…The opposite end of the spectrum for information and knowledge engineering presents approaches which focus upon the development and application of formal ontologies and knowledge based systems to support design decisions by supplying manufacturing knowledge Cochrane et al 2008Cochrane et al , 2009Gunendran and Young 2010;Chungoora et al 2013). All of these approaches aim to ameliorate the representation and supply of manufacturing knowledge to facilitate quicker and better design decision making and therefore enable reuse.…”

Extending product lifecycle management for manufacturing knowledge sharing

“…The diagram identifies general categories of information, the core types of concepts (i.e., classes) that fall within these categories and important associations (i.e., relations) across concepts. The fundamentals of this ontology involve the notion of part planning using part families and features [32,33], where sufficient flexibility in the formal meaning of concepts has been accommodated to support the improved configuration of design and manufacturing solution.…”