Studies On Bus Concept Development Mode And Design Methodology

Product developing technology is one of key factors in bus technique evolution. With the development of global economy and technology progress, new methods and techniques for product development are booming, which is a strong support to bus development. Today and in the future, the competitive symbol in bus market consists in product innovation and satisfaction of custom requirements. Products have to be rapidly put into market for winning the market competition and meeting the need of custom. Product innovation mostly lies on conceptual design. The crucial role of bus conceptual design within the whole process of bus development should not be overlooked. Conceptual design is a complicated, flexible, and nonstandard process. Designers are also easy to neglect its effectiveness all the time. Compared with engineering design and manufacturing process, it is actually lack of design methods that leads bus conceptual design activities to be of problems.The relevant research work has been carried out in this paper about bus conceptual development by means of concurrent engineering and advanced information, computer and network technologies.First conceptual development process for generic product is established. Its characteristic lies in using information existed to the conceptual development phase, that is, for creating specification and new concepts. Then, the bus conceptual design flow is built based on the generic process. Some knowledge base and database are included in it for information reuse and assistant decision-making and teamwork is proceeding. The framework of bus conceptual development system is set up based on concurrent engineering and Internet. By analyzing the requirements and characteristics of collaborative design environment, the author has designed the functional modules of system and described their function, characteristics and principles in detail. Moreover a mechanism has been put forward to enable integrated information shared in the product conceptual development phase, including communication, data structure connectivity, and XML language and STEP adopted to realize information share function. Concept mapping technique is applied to bus conceptual design activities. It is a technique for information representation utilizing a nature cognitive framework, which provides a practical platform for innovation. It describes ideas and concepts by concept map and makes design activities easy and standard. The concept map structure is open, systematic and hierarchical.The tool of concept mapping is developed based IE browser and Java languages. Each authorized user can access to the uniform interface and proceed to design, modify, and discuss online. Concept maps have three hierarchies that contain all design results. The design activities are collaborative and the conflicts can be resolved in time.The method of cluster analysis for exist information is studied on product costs. The correlations among cost items and among sub-system costs are discussed. The results can be interpreted under help of the experience of designer and manufacturer and may guide new product development to fall costs and create specification.Manipulating product architecture method is studied and applied to a bus seat and chassis conceptual design. The method utilizes exist product information to create the relation matrix, and groups product architecture with Cuthill-McKee algorithm. Its purpose is to rationalize functions, organs and parts of new product, ensure the right number of parts, and generate modules. It can be reused to create rapidly multiple concepts of architecture and also makes evaluation and selection concepts easier.CAE introduced into conceptual design process is a necessary result of implementing concurrent engineering. The advantages of CAE analysis during the early design stages make designer as soon as possible analyze, evaluate, and optimize the whole bus performances, in order to meet the requirements of strength, stiffness, and reliability, and to obtain the optimization conce...