Integrated Product Development

The search for total integration of information during the life cycle of a product i.e. during all of the stages of its development beginning with its conception and ending with its disposal, has always been an engineering goal for which various methods have been created.

The integration between the stages of the life cycle, one of the primary needs of simultaneous engineering, can be served through an adequate representation of the product.

However, one difficulty is not having a methodology for the development of the system and of the operations. This occurs primarily if the modeling is done with the only objective of creating a geometric model, since this makes the sharing of design results with other areas difficult.

The introduction of digital electronic means gave impulse to the development of the product at the same time that the particular systems in each developmental phase created barriers to this integration.

The SCPM Laboratory searches for means to break these barriers and provide for the integrated development of the product by using features technology in the modeling of the product.

Fruits of this research are the FESTEVAL projects: Findes-R and Findes-P.

With the use of features technology, the creation of the product is structurally differentiated from the traditional system in which the designer creates a purely geometric model with the help of the CAD system and this model is used for process planning, many times in the form of a representative design.

In this case the designer creates a geometric model based on the features library and inserts technological information for manufacturing and production means in the same model in such a way that the NC program can be generated automatically.

One of the primary characteristics of this way of building a model is the improvement in the interface with the designer. Since there is a better mental representation for the created model that contains geometric and technological information, it makes integration between systems possible.

The benefits of using features technology are less probability for error, a reduction in designing time and automatic generation of the NC program. Since the conditions for manufacturing are verified within the model creation, this also guarantees the manufacturing of all of the modeled pieces.

The FESTIVAL project was developed from November 1997 to December 2000 with financing from the European Commission. The CAD Unigraphics software and its programming platform UG/Open and the programming language C++ were used.

Partners in this project were: Institut für Produktionsmanagement, Technologie und Werkzeugmaschinen - PTW/TUD; Institut für Datenverarbeitung in der Konstruktion - DiK/TUD; Kade-Tech S.A.; Romi Industries S.A. and ProSTEP AG.

The development of this project was designed within the object-oriented paradigm with the UML language.

One of the objectives that was reached in this project was the generation of a model based on features that can be exported to a file that obeys the STEP norms, using the features manufacturing application protocol . This file can be used in other phases of product development without loss or redundancy, in other parts of product development.

Therefore, the objective of integrating a model created in the CAD system with other systems in the development chain has been achieved.

Research in this project continues to search for improvements in the interface and the implementation of new features.

In the development of this research project, two master theses and 18 articles in specialized journals were published.

From the time laboratory activities began, the FINES-P and FINES-R projects were developed with the CAD Euclid3 software using the Fortan language in its programming platform. In these projects, modeling interfaces were created that permit the creation of models based on features for prismatic (FINDES-P) as well as for rotational pieces (FINDES-R). The integration of product development in this project is done through the software, in order to automatically carry out the manufacture of the designed piece.

Based on the knowledge obtained in the research on integrated product development, SCPM intends to advance by applying these consolidated concepts to new existing technologies, for example, data exchange using XML and structuring the product data model for the Semantic Web.