Towards a product structure for bridging industrial and engineering design issues

Paper in proceeding, 2005

This paper presents real-time interactive spatial visualizations (VR - Virtual Reality) that reflect a product structure, covering industrial and engineering design information that ranges from requirements, functions and systems to design solutions and product architecture. We exemplify visualization in requirements assessment for an automotive interior cockpit unit and for the layout of a ride-on lawn mower. Visualized structure and behavior are then related to the product model and so-called organ units. We choose to make use of open-source VR - Open Scene Graph - that has optimum real-time performance, up-to-date rendering, and work on simple workstations. One example is the visualization of issues which influence seating height. The optimum seat position and preferred height above the engine are critical dimensions in this case, shown in Figure 2. It is therefore important to show how these should be varied in direction and amount as done here. The "optimum seat position" requirement is then related to the ergonomic function "Support pelvis" while the "preferred height" requirement is an iib relation from the engine to the "Support pelvis" function. Another example treats requirements on a passive knee absorber. It is important in this case to show the areas covered by active and passive protection and the interval of initial knee speed. We suggest here colored fields which show likelihood of impact position of the knees for a certain body size, so that the structure stiffness can be optimized and any conflicts with other functionality such as storage can be characterized. The current ambition of the research work as a whole is to cover several areas for visual spatial representation of a product model as suggested in this paper. The case studies in this paper have exemplified some of these areas: Design intention and constraints. Communicative functions, Intended technical functionality, Variation, Uncertainties, Meta data Design solutions, product architecture. Aesthetics and ergonomics, Properties, Physical layout and package, Modular aspects, Meta data