Efficient Means for Platform-Based Development – Emphasizing Integrated, Information-Rich System Models
Doctoral thesis, 2011

Competition in the automotive industry is fierce, which in recent years has been demonstrated by some of the companies’ struggle to survive. A significant challenge is posed by the market’s ever-increasing expectations of new and impressive products, while maintaining profitability. Mass customization, with its high volumes and economy of scale, has been an approach to combine customers’ wishes for novel individualized products and low production prices. A key feature is to reuse design solutions across products, and basing the design on so-called platforms is one way to achieve this. But reuse is not limited to the design. Resources within, for example, production, service, and marketing are to be reused when applicable. This creates a need for information exchange that, especially when parts are subject to frequent changes, cannot be based only on personal meetings. Product descriptions support co-development, when they contain the information needed by the stakeholders. Some of the expectations on the product description are that it will support all lifecycles, be understandable, and reflect the dependences between the co-developing systems. The configurable component framework is intended to support concurrent designing of complex and variant-rich systems in all lifecycle phases. The research results presented in this thesis contribute to the enhancement of the framework in the following areas: - They improve the developers’ ability to create design variants. The part-based description is supplemented with a more abstract description. One of the framework’s key features is to represent multiple variants by one configurable model. The mechanisms that enable this are presented here. - Reuse can be facilitated in various ways by knowledge-rich design descriptions when information is explicitly given showing why the design is made as it is. With the introduced design rationale, implemented using a function-means model that describes the reasoning behind the design and which considerations resulted in the design, it is more likely that the design can be used and reused as intended. - Before a new product can reach the market, its design and the production facility used to materialize it have to be completed. As these design objects depend heavily on each other, both design tasks gain from information exchange between them. To support this, an integral model for the co-development of products and production systems is presented. - The inability of today’s product description systems to produce a complete list of parts, required to manufacture a specific product variant, reveals the need to discuss models’ completeness, consistency, and compatibility. Results are presented that extend the product description with expectations on the design, performance models, and ways to evaluate expectation against predicted behavior, beside the original design solutions. Together, these contributions improve the configurable component framework’s ability to support a holistic product development.

function-means model

product families

product model

design rationale

integral model

platform-based design

reuse

systems theory

complete

consistent

product development

configurable component

Virtual Development Laboratory
Opponent: Niels Henrik Mortensen

Author

Stellan Gedell

Chalmers, Product and Production Development, Product Development

Design Rationale for Efficient Product Platform Development: A systematic configurable component approach

Proceedings of TMCE 2008 Symposium, April 21-25, 2008, Izmir, Turkey,; (2008)p. 537-550

Paper in proceeding

Configurable Product Platform Descriptions - Considering Design Reasoning Aspects

Proceedings of the 2nd Nordic Conference on Product Lifecycle Management, January 28-29 2009, Götebeorg,; (2009)p. 63-75

Paper in proceeding

Integrated Model for Co-Development of Products and Production Systems - A Systems Theory Approach

Concurrent Engineering Research and Applications,; Vol. 19(2011)p. 139-156

Journal article

Integrated Product and Production Model – Issues on Completeness, Consistency and Compatibility

International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED'11, 15 - 18 August 2011, Technical University of Denmark,; (2011)

Paper in proceeding

Product Description Using Configurable Components

Proc. of ICED´03, August 19-21, 2003, Stockholm, Sweden,; (2003)

Journal article

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Production

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Innovation and entrepreneurship

ISBN

978-91-7385-609-6

Doktorsavhandlingar vid Chalmers tekniska högskola. Ny serie: 3290

Virtual Development Laboratory

Opponent: Niels Henrik Mortensen

More information

Created

10/7/2017