Concurrent Design Theory And Methodology For Mechanical Product And Its Application In Industry

With the increasing competition in the worldwide market, Concurrent Engineering(or Concurrent Design, Simultaneous Engineering) , has drawn intensive attention from both academic and industry. It considers multiple life cycle factors and is aimed at shorter product development time. The Concurrent Design theory and methodology for mechanical product and its application in industry have been investigated extensively in our present work. This dissertation summarized our research work in the following two areas: 1. Theory and Methodology for Mechanical Product Concurrent DesignThe research was inspired by our " 863/CIMS" project "Concurrent Design theory and methodology"(No. 511-04.-0125). The major objective of the project is to analysis the process of mechanical design, and develop a formal approach to implement Concurrent Design in industrial environment. As a solution, one basic concept Micro-Design-Cycle (MDC), and two supporting tools are developed: "Object-Behavior diagram" for establishing product global data models, and "Object life cycle state diagram" for establishing dynamic function control model. The details are stated as follows:(1) The concept of MDC is used to describe concurrent design process. By MDC, various activities in product design are organized to proceed parallelly as much as possible. MDC is able to be implemented based upon product global data model and dynamic function control model for concurrent design.(2) "Object-Behavior(OB) diagram" is a Object-Oriented system analysis technique, in which the Aggregation and Generalization are add onto conventional Entity-Relation model, and the concept of sub-system is used for modify complex objects. As a result, OB diagram can represent very complicated data types and their relationships in concurrent environment. It is used to build product global data model for concurrent design.(3) A computer aided modelling tool called OBWin is developed. It runs in Windows 3.1 environment. It converts the graphic OB model directly to the data format that is directly usable in computers, including C++ programming language and product modelling language EXPRESS in STEP.(4) The concept of Object life cycle is introduced. "Object state diagram" is to describe dynamic characteristics of object and based on it, The dynamic function control model for concurrent design can be built.