Integrated Engineering Environments for Large Complex Products

Abstract

An introduction is given to the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, along with a brief explana tion of the main focus towards large made-to-order products. Three key areas of research at the Centre, which have evolved as a result of collaboration with industrial partners from various sectors of industry, are identified as (1) decision support and optimisation, (2) de sign for lifecycle, and (3) design integration and co-ordination. A summary of the unique features of large made-to-order products is then presented, which includes the need for integration and co-ordination technologies. Thus, an overview of the existing integration and co ordination technologies is presented followed by a brief explanation of research in these areas at the Engineering Design Centre. A more detailed description is then presented regarding the co-ordination aspect of research being conducted at the Engineering De sign Centre, in collaboration with the CAD Centre at the University of Strathelyde. Concurrent Engineering is acknowledged as a strategy for improving the design process, however design co-ordination is viewed as a principal requirement for its successful implementation. That is, design co-ordination is proposed as being the key to a mechanism that is able to maximise and realise any potential opportunity of concurrency. Thus, an agent-oriented approach to co-ordination is presented, which incorporates various types of agents responsible for managing their respective activities. The co-ordinated approach, which is implemented within the Design Co-ordination System, in cludes features such as resource management and monitoring, dynamic scheduling, activity direction, task enactment, and information management. An application of the Design Co-ordination System, in conjunction with a robust concept exploration tool, shows that the computational design analysis involved in evaluating many design concepts can be performed more efficiently through a co-ordinated approach.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.