Abstract. Most of industries currently spend too much time to find information on past product design process. This considerably reduces the time it can devote to innovation. The authors assume that the design process meta-model seems very interesting for modelling the design rational and then for accelerating information retrieval. Indeed, the model of the design process partly supports every resources involved in decision making activities (i.e. who, what, when, why, where, how). The authors therefore propose the use of a MBE architecture for driving the product modelling based on the design process model. The UML activity diagrams and the IDEFØ meta-model are linked for supporting automatic generation of product models using specific transformation knowledge. The CAD model is partly generated from the product functional analysis.Keywords: Design process modelling, Model Based Engineering, CAD modelling.
IntroductionThe engineering of mechanical product is a research and industrial activity which studies the design of complex mechanical systems. The design process, that involves the collaboration of various experts using domain specific software, raises syntactic and semantic interoperability issues which are not addressed by existing software solutions or their underlying concepts. The second section of the paper depicts the research context based on engineering design, knowledge and data modelling supported by the CAx and PLM software. It then presents some current issues for linking the functional model to the CAD model in order to track the design rationale.Section three introduces, on the one hand, how design process modelling is necessary to really understand the design rationale across the time. On the other hand, the design process is also used to drive interoperable data transformations in order to assure data propagation in case of design changes.Section four proposes a flexible model-based software architecture that allows for a federation of experts to define and collaborate in innovative design processes. This interoperable architecture is based on "projection" of models from specific commercial