Computers and Industrial Engineering Vol. 25, Nos 1-4, pp. 321-324, 1993
Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved
0360-8352/9356.00+0.00
Copyright © 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd
INTiTJ J JGENT CONCURRENT ENGINI:~RING
ENVIRONMI~NT
Ganesh M. Krishnaswamy, Ahmad K. Elshennawy
Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) Laboratory
Department of Industrial Engineering & Management Systems
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL 32816.
ABSTRACT
Thoughseveral are the in-roads that have been made towards achievingdesign-for-manufacturability(DFM)and design-forassembly (DFA), speaking of some of the crucial issues associated with concurrent engineering, yet very few comprehensiveblueprints exist that speak of a near-complete concurrent engineering environment. This could mainly be attributed to the multifarious
versions of how to successfullysetup a concurrent engineering environment for today's ever changing engineering scenario. An
operational concurrent engineering environmentneeds to be addressed in its totalityor near-totality. This paper is one such venture.
INTRODUCTION
Greater engineering productivity has brought with it more design alternatives and more analyses.
Design complexities lengthen the lead time to manufacture, making it more difficult to anticipate the eventual
impact of design decisions, place a greater burden on engineering talent, and heighten the need for better
design tools. The competitive pressures for more efficient design and manufacturing methods are also strong.
In particular, automating access to design and manufacturing data for teams of engineers and administrators
has become an important technical priority.
To meet these challenges, manufacturers are turning to concurrent engineering. They are forsaking
sequential methods of product development and adopting methods that integrate product design and the
product development process. Such a compact relationship, spoken of as above, envisages the need to
implement automatic data flows between design and manufacturing. This is so central to implementing
concurrent engineering that it is rapidly coming to be regarded as one of its key technical enablers.
In this era of electronics and computers, it is but natural to employ these hi-tech tools to continually
improve time-to-market, quality, and costs; increasingly this means building an automated concurrent
engineering environment. Extrapolating this a step further, it could be fabricated to incorporate some
intelligence, the later part of this proposal being devoted towards illuminating the same.
Past work in concurrent engineering has meant dealing with one or more aspects of the science of
concurrent engineering, and never integrating all these into a single coherent process. This could mainly be
attributed to the multifarious versions of how to successfully setup a concurrent environment suited for today's
ever changing engineering scenario.
PROPOSED W O R K
Lets consider the implications of considering manufacturing after design. The product development
team of a company, consisting of personnel from market research through marketing, works on all aspects of
the product, always with an aim to give the customers what they want, i.e. good product quality. Since design
has always been an iterative process, at least theoretically there never reaches such a stage when the ideal
product has been designed. This goes to say that there exast numerous stages ot product design, the
termination at any of which could lead to a different product.
Also, when customers feel a need for a product, they almost immediately and invariable they associate
such a need with a physical object, which to them is the answer to their wanting. Nothing gives the customer
more satisfaction than a product which will satisfy his/her need(s), as well as conforms to the customer's
visualization of the same.
Aligning once again with the product development team, manufacturing is such a process which tries
to machine a workpiece with as close a conformance as possible, to an idea or a drawing. There never arise
questions associated with physical product variations arising due to different machining techniques or different
machining equipment, unlike the process of design.
To give the customer utmost satisfaction and to clear the nebula preventing an unambiguous
understanding of whether it is possible to generalize the process of concurrent engineering immaterial of the
company involved, the route from design to manufacturing could be reversed and experimented with. In this
line of reasoning could lie the answer to a much vaunted question.
The ultimate goal of this venture shall be the creation and experimentation of a fully operational and
generic concurrent engineering environment, as an answer to the numerous problems confronting the dynamic
industrial fabric of today.
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Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Computers and Industrial Engineering
For this purpose, the entire concurrent engineering environment will be thought of as depicted in Figure 1.
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USER INTERFACE
To address the precise & complete understanding of the customer needs, the traditional Quality
Function Deployraent'8 tool, the House o£ Quality which addresses the voice of the customer, will be
augmented by computer graphics tools such as virtual reality tool kits dealing with the customer's vision of his
product.
Computer graphics technology enables us to create a remarkable variety of digital images and displays
that, given the right conditions, effectively enrich communication capabilities. Real-time computer graphics
are an essential component of the multi-sensory environment of virtual reality.
Virtual reality technology is an emerging field with certain unique characteristics that lends itself so as
to make possible the closest comprehension of a customer's vision by the product development team. Such
systems project the human operator into an interactive environment mediated by artificial electronic &
electromechanical devices. Moreover a typical virtual world combines multiple input & output devices
operating concurrently, with the output servers allowing simultaneous feedback over multiple sensory channels.
Though virtual reality would have made for a better user interface, owing to the time and material
constraints in which we find ourselves, the next best option was one built upon the design and drafting package
AutoCAD. The single most important qualification of this software is its ability to permit the creation and
editing of object attributes.
ENGINI~RING DATA MANAGEMENT
Typically, many different CAD/CAM systems are involved, and often these are widely dispersed
geographically and span many departments in one or more companies. Of recent, Engineering Data
Management (EDM) providers are stepping in to fill this need. Once viewed as a database application with
an engineering accent, EDM is rapidly evolving into a concurrent engineering enabler, or Concurrent
Engineering Automation (CEA) product.
To be a true CEA application, data management software must have strong networking features that
support a wide range of open and proprietary networks, workstations, and personal computers as well as
software drawing and model formats. In other words, it must be able to reach and service all participants in
product development, regardless of what hardware and software they use. In addition, the product must
provide varying levels of viewing and update privileges for individuals and groups. It must enable or automate
project tracking and control features that tie into project planning and management software, and should
include milestone posting, electronic approval mechanism, and percent-complete estimating. It has to
accommodate document annotation and redlining. And of course, it must provide traditional EDM functions
such as document storage and retrieval by meaningful engineering or manufacturing reference, search and
retrieval, and automated data archiving and backup.
The need for an automatic database update facility cannot be underemphasized. Amidst numerous
databases, those of design and manufacturing demand to be explicitly mentioned in that these are at the heart
of any concurrent engineering methodology in practice today. Consequently, getting these two to communicate
successful and constructively, with an aim at effective EDM, may well be the keystone of concurrent
engineering automation. Such an industrial perspective shall be adopted.
Fourth generation languages like Superbase or Oracle could be employed, the virtue of these being their
compatibility with CAD databases, such as the ones from AutoCAD. A Relational Database Management
System (RDBMS). such as Microsoft Access, made available to the Product Development Team members
across a computer network, has the ability to quickly search for, find, and bring together meaningful
information stored as data in separate tables, these tables being related in a direct or an indirect fashion. This
will be used as a real-time model management system, to manipulate and interface the object models of
AutoCAD with a working domain which can control the process, based on the decisions taken in an expert
system session.
KRISHNASWAMYANDElshennawy: Intelligent Concurrent Engineering Environment
323
THE JOURNEY
The salient features of such a process can be viewed from Figure 2. The product development team
helps the customer communicate his requirements to them, by interpreting his product vision as a CAD
drawing in AutoCAD. The creation of such a drawing could be envisaged as merely the collection of predefined features or objects, which could be parametrically manipulated to bring out the image realistically.
Moreover, these pre-defined features or objects could be so defined as to reflect the machining capabilities
of the manufacturing industry in question, thereby always providing due consideration to the manufacturability
of the product. This drawing serves as the ideal product, the delivery of which to the customer, after its safe
design, will make the customer feel that the product is truly his/hers.
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(Au~CAD)
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An object oriented expert system like Level 5, containing the heuristics of DFM and DFA could be
created, which would suggest intelligent changes to be made to the drawing so as to give it a design basis.
Since all the above mentioned softwares can be set running under the windows environment, it will be possible
to Open an output file to dump the suggestions of an expert system session, and make it communicate with the
AutoCAD database through Microsoft Access, so as to alter the CAD drawing suitably.
Against such a backdrop, the engineering data management system also keeps track of $uch other
information as market survey reports to help standardize the product to stretch its appeal to encompass a
larger customer clientele, information about available manufacturing processes, design analysis algorithms, and
vendor inventory details. The relational database management system would be employed to relate all these
discrete packets of data, so as to be made available to the product development team in a meaningful mode.
The role of such a data management system is depicted in Figure 3.
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324
Proceedings of the 15th Annual Conference on Computers and Industrial Engineering
CONCLUSIONS & RECOMMEMDATIONS FOR FUTURE WORK
Engineering data management (EDM) has come a long way since its humble beginnings as a simple file
manager. One can expect this technology to be greatly improved and grow in importance as an enabler for
simultaneous engineering and systems integration, while at the same time giving users much-needed automated
archiving, retrieval, and updating systems for engineering and manufacturing documentation.
Global macros with jurisdiction over various software applications, could lead to the successful
fabrication of a dynamic concurrent engineering environment, in which, apart from the phase of user interface,
the rest of the product development process would have been gifted with intelligence enough to turn out
products that both the customer(s) and the organization can proudly associate with.
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