Key characteristics (KCs) play a significant role in product lifecycle management (PLM) and in collaborative and global product development. Over the last decade, KCs methodologies and tools have been studied and practiced in several domains of the product lifecycle, and many world-class companies have introduced KCs considerations into their product development practices. However, there has been no systematic survey of KCs techniques, methodologies, and practices in this respect. This paper aims to give a comprehensive survey of KCs methodologies, and practices from the perspective of enterprise integration and PLM. The paper firstly presents a holistic framework of KCs methodologies and practices through the product lifecycle, and summarizes the fundamentals of KCs including their definition and classification, KC flowdown, and the identification and selection of KCs. A review of the KCs methods and practices in the product lifecycle is then presented, particularly in engineering design, manufacturing planning, production and testing as well as information and knowledge management respectively. Finally, the problems and challenges for future research on KCs techniques are discussed.

This paper deals with the design of periodic piezoelectric structures for broadband vibration control. By shunting identical negative capacitances to the periodically distributed piezoelectric patches, a wide and continuous band gap is created so as to cover the frequency range of interest. This way the modal density of the structure is reduced and the modal shapes are localized at the boundaries. A large proportion of the energy can then be removed or dissipated by a small number of dampers or energy harvesters integrated within the negative capacitance circuits. A design process is proposed to achieve the wide band gap. The overall amount of piezoelectric materials is constrained in order to keep mass of structures low. The wave electromechanical coupling factor is proposed and used as a criterion. This allows to reach the largest width of the band gap by using a stable value of negative capacitance. The control of multiple high-order modes of a cantilever beam is considered as an example. The vibration reduction performance of the designed piezoelectric structures is presented and the influences of band gap resonance, resistor and the boundary condition are discussed. The proposed approach is fully based on wave characteristics and it does not rely on any modal information. It is therefore promising for applications at mid-and high frequencies where the access to the exact modal information is difficult.