Information modeling for variation management during the product and manufacturing process design

Abstract

For car and aircraft industries, Design for Manufacturing, Robust Design and Conceptual Process Planning are a key activity to evaluate manufacturability, to improve design in the product development stage. Moreover, the inherent imperfections of manufacturing processes and resources (Manufacturing Process Key Characteristics, MPKCs) involve a degradation of functional part or product characteristics (Part / Product Key Characteristics, PKCs). The management of Key Characteristics (KCs) has become an important issue in product and process design and concurrent engineering. In order to ensure a certain level of quality, to assess the manufacturability, to select resources and to improve design, it is important to know the causality between MPKCs and PKCs. Effective reuse of enterprise knowledge about causality is a key strategic component of integrated product and processes development. The goal here is to put the management of KCs in a concurrent engineering context. There is an important question that would need to be looked upon: How to formalize and to capitalize the causality between MPKCs and PKCs? Therefore, to formalize and to capitalize this causality, we describe an information model.

A Welding Capability Assessment Method (WCAM) to support multidisciplinary design of aircraft structures

“…3 Example of KC flowdown applied on airplane wings system by Thornton [35] sequence of KCs is made so that inputs and outputs of each operation (Opi) can represent the variation propagation. In a similar fashion, some authors [41][42][43] have been using the KC flowdown approach developed by Thornton [35] to determine what drives quality. An example of a KC flowdown is given in Fig.…”

Identification of key design characteristics for complex product adaptive design

“…Yang et al [6] used KCs as an efficient medium for coordination among contractors, subcontractors, and partners, to set up a feasible and efficient model to facilitate the quality assurance in the supply chain. Dantan et al [7] used product and process KCs as well as products and manufacturing resources to establish an information model for supporting complex product collaborative design.…”

“…Some enterprises and scholars used a method called key characteristic (KC) control to alleviate the above problems, such as using KCs to capture the most similar instances [2][3][4][5], or using KCs as an efficient medium for communication with suppliers [6,7]. However, at present, there is no mutual definition for a KC.…”

“…At present, there are some researches on the application of KCs [2][3][4][5][6][7][10][11][12][13][14][15], but few on the systematic identification. In addition, most of these studies focus on the KPCs, less on KDCs.…”

“…Besides the enterprises, some researchers who studied on the KCs also gave their definitions [7,8]. Although the KC definitions may vary from corporations to researchers, the KC's methods have a common goal that is to identify a small set of critical features for an organization to focus on during design and manufacturing [21].…”