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Part 12: New PLMInternational audienceThe steadily growing complexity of products, interfacing processes, value creation networks and IT environments drive today’s PLM solutions to their limits. How does this effect engineers? Over 1,400 engineers from the German industry provided feedback in 2011 – with alarming but expected results. Almost two thirds of the respondents can only spend 20% or less time on average for core tasks such as development, design or validation. The study confirmed a lack of time for creative engineering activities caused by a massive coordination and communication overhead. Could engineers and designers be relieved from routine and administrative tasks in product lifecycle management by means of current “intelligent” technologies? In constant dialogue with industry and PLM experts, the Fraunhofer IPK and TUB have investigated the demand for intelligence in product lifecycle management. This paper reflects on the current situation of PLM and introduces a conceptual framework (Engineering Operating System) for next generation PLM. Subsequently, an Engineering Automation Capabilities (EAC) stair step model is proposed and selected research results for “intelligence” in PLM are presented

Abstract:As a result of the growing demand for highly customized and individual products, companies need to enable flexible and intelligent manufacturing. Cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) will act autonomously in the future in an interlinked production and enable such flexibility. However, German mid-sized plant manufacturers rarely use virtual technologies for design and validation in order to design CPPS. The research project Virtual Commissioning with Smart Hybrid Prototyping (VIB-SHP) investigated the usage of virtual technologies for manufacturing systems and CPPS design. Aspects of asynchronous communicating, intelligent-and autonomous-acting production equipment in an immersive validation environment, have been investigated. To enable manufacturing system designers to validate CPPS, a software framework for virtual prototyping has been developed. A mechatronic construction kit for production system design integrates discipline-specific models and manages them in a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution. With this construction kit manufacturing designers are able to apply virtual technologies and the validation of communication processes with the help of behavior models. The presented approach resolves the sequential design process for the development of mechanical, electrical, and software elements and ensures the consistency of these models. With the help of a bill of material (BOM)-and signal-based alignment of the discipline-specific models in an integrated mechatronic product model, the communication of the design status and changes are improved. The re-use of already-specified and -designed modules enable quick behavior modeling, code evaluation, as well as interaction with the virtualized assembly system in an immersive environment.

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