Supporting Traceability of Design Rationale in an Automated Engineer-To-Order Business Model

• The ability to efficiently and quickly design and manufacture highly customized product can provide a competitive advantage for companies acting on a market with shifting customer demands. A business model based on highly customized product requires advanced application systems for automating the work of generating product variants based on different customer specification. The establishment of a system for automated design and production preparation is a significant investment in time and money and is expected to give revenues over many years. To maintain a design automation system’s usefulness over time, frequent updating of design rules and execution control will normally become a necessity. Reuse of the system encapsulated generic product family descriptions when developing a new product family is also perceived to significantly increase the efficiency in system development. The scope and the purpose of this research originate from industrial problems and needs which have been identified within research projects carried out in near collaboration with industrial partners. New concepts, perceived as prescriptive models, are in this work introduced, evaluated, and refined which is in accordance with the design modelling approach [Duffy, Andreasen, 1995]. The focus of this paper is a case study carried out at a company with long experience of systems for automated variant design. The main objective is to provide a system foundation for modelling and management of product knowledge in design automation systems to support reuse, expansion and maintenance.

Subject headings

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

engineer-to-order

design rationale

knowledge management

knowledge modelling

design automation

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)