Process Management Technology Research With Unforced Decoupling And Adaptive Granularity Control On Product Concurrent Development

Today, if companies want to win the competitions in the market, they must quickly develop new products to meet the demands and changes of the market, and capture the market as soon as possible. Product design and development has become a key sector for manufacturing to gain the competitive advantage. Since the implementation of concurrent engineering, product development cycle can be shortened, product quality can be improved, and product development cost can be reduced. But at the same time, the product development process management has also become more and more complex and important. And concurrent design process planning is the most critical stage in the process management of product concurrent development.An unforced decoupling strategy other than forced decoupling or tearing to solve the problem in concurrent design process planning is produced in this paper to make the concurrent design process planning more valuable. Firstly, twice-modeling concept is proposed by building an Information Flow Matrix (IFM) based on the influence of relationships between information flows during task execution. After re-constructing the IFM to determine the order levels of information flows, the provider-receiver relationship between tasks and information flows are used to instruct the planning of the key tasks with unforced decoupling.In addition, a design task is decomposed according to the completion condition and meaning. Task Subdivision Matrix (TSM) is build up and adaptive subdivision of design tasks is realized based on synchronous mapping of Coded Design Structure Matrix (C-DSM) and Re-engineering Information Flow Matrix (R-IFM). And the priority of the subtasks is defined. Then, Task-Information flow Hierarchy Plot (T-IHP) is build up and the whole design process planning, which includes the planning of other tasks or subtasks besides the key tasks, is completed and optimized by synchronous mapping of Information flow Hierarchy Plot (IHP) and TSM.The proposed methodology is illustrated by an application to the vehicle overall design process planning. The "pseudo coupled" or "pseudo dependent" relationships are eliminated effectively without forced decoupling and the concurrency of the whole design process is improved obviously with good planning efficiency.Finally, a product concurrent development process management system is designed based on the process planning method of product concurrent design, which is proposed in this paper. And the concurrent development process planning of a Set-Top-Box product is simulated by using this system.