This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Web of Science (1) Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Bouikni, N. Articles by Desrochers, A. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

A Multiple Views Management System for Concurrent Engineering and PLM

Departement of Automated Production Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Supérieure 1100 Notre-Dame West, Montreal, H3C1K3, Canada

Louis Rivest

Departement of Automated Production Engineering, Ecole de Technologie Supérieure 1100 Notre-Dame West, Montreal, H3C1K3, Canada, louis.rivest{at}etsmtl.ca

Alain Desrochers

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke 2500 Boulevard de l'Université, Sherbrooke, Québec, J1H 2R1, Canada

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an approach for controlling and exploiting product-related information throughout its lifecycle as needed by various business functions. Concurrent engineering (CE) integrates several disciplines contributing to product design. Both PLM and CE involve information sharing amongst disciplines having a specific point of view regarding the product. While each discipline exerts its own expertise and methods on the definition of the product and its related processes, information must remain consistent for all disciplines and throughout the evolution of the product definition. Therefore, being able to efficiently manage multiple views fulfilling the needs of multiple disciplines is an important issue. This article, proposes a multiple views generation mechanism incorporated in the product feature evolution validation (PFEV) model. The PFEV model is a dynamic workflow that controls the information flow needed to support a product definition evolution (PDE) while supporting its validation by all the disciplines involved. The model addresses two qualities of an information system: dispatching relevant PDE information to appropriate disciplines and providing this information according to specific views. With current CAD tool implementations, disciplines will not need all the information obtained from the numerical model, which often comes from files characterizing the geometry. Thus, each discipline must interpret the information characterizing the product by performing some filtering or adaptation in order to obtain what is relevant to its function. Two cases are associated with the views generation mechanism that corresponds to the elimination of not-useful explicit information and to the adaptation of implicit information, respectively. To accomplish this, three alternatives are distinguished to generate a view: create a new view, recuperate an existing view and update an existing view. The process used to create a new view is composed of three stages: selection of data element to be treated, selection of treatment parameters to be applied, selection and execution of views generation algorithm. The generated view is then saved in a table of views characterization, which is used to recuperate an existing view. Three reference elements (treatment parameters, views generation algorithm, and knowledge parameters) are saved when a new view is created. These elements are used for each update required for the existing view.

Key Words: multiple views • concurrent engineering • collaborative work • views generation • PLM • product design.

Concurrent Engineering, Vol. 16, No. 1, 61-72 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1063293X07084641


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?