Designing Design Processes in Product Lifecycle Management: Research Issues and Strategies

Abstract

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) promises to further a holistic consideration of product design, emphasizing integration, interoperability, and sustainability throughout a product’s lifecycle. Thus far, efforts have focused on addressing lifecycle concerns from a product-centric perspective by exploiting the reusability and scalability of existing products through product platform and product family design. Not much attention has been paid to leveraging the design process and its design in addressing lifecycle considerations, however. In striving for sustainability, it is the design process that should be considered to constitute an engineering enterprise’s primary resource commitment. In this paper, an overview of the challenges inherent in designing design processes is provided. These challenges are subsequently illustrated with regard to several design scenarios of varying complexity, using an example involving the design of Linear Cellular Alloys. A distinction is made between product related requirements/goals and design process related requirements/goals. Requirements, research issues, and strategies for addressing the diverse needs of modeling design processes from a decision-centric perspective are established. Finally, key elements for enabling the integrated design of products and their underlying design processes in a systematic fashion are provided, motivating the extension of PLM to include the lifecycle considerations of design processes, thereby moving towards Design Process Lifecycle Management (DPLM).

Integrated Product and Process Family Data Modeling for Product Lifecycle Management

“…( 3) Assembly. An entity of the type assembly represents a set of one or more product variants at any arbitrary intermediate level of the generic product structure.…”

“…As a strategic approach, PLM applies a set of business solutions in support of an integrated product design, realization, resource utilization, and supply chain management [2]. While many researchers have dedicated themselves to addressing product lifecycle concerns with focus on product platform and product family design [3], not much attention has been paid to the backend of product fulfillment, i.e., production [4]. Furthermore, it is at the production stage that product costs are actually committed and product quality and lead times are highlighted the most [4].…”

Design for adaptability (DFAD)—a new concept for achieving sustainable design

“…Incorporation of advances in the area of modularity, customization, and platform product design [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33] are also critical to the success of the DFAD approach. Lipson et al [27] discuss evolutionary design systems which apply principles inspired from biological evolution models.…”

Design Navigator System: A Case Study in Improving Product Development Through Improved Information Management

“…Many different efforts have been made to model and represent design information and knowledge [Bilg97,Bens01,Neel03,Panc04,Mock04]. Some of these methods are highly specialized and some of them are very abstract.…”