CONCURRENT ENGINEERING PHILOSOPHY IMPLEMENTED USING COMPUTER-OPTIMIZED DESIGN

Concurrent engineering is seen as a philosophy with the aim of simultaneously involving suppliers and customers at an early stage in the design process. The transfer of technology has been established as the key element in this process, together with the coordination of the product development process. An ESPRIT (7752) project at De Montfort University has benchmarked the levels of concurrent engineering (CE) of manufacturing companies in the United Kingdom. This has shown, in general, that two fundamental methods for the implementation of CE exist, these being specialized multi-functional teams and multi-functional teams using computer optimization, the latter being seen as the way forward. This paper examines the use of an expert system toolkit, particularly in the design for manufacture (DFM) process. Dealing with knowledge acquisition, the function as well as the structure of component elements is represented. The paper also describes work by De Montfort University in integrating an expert and computer aided design (CAD) system that meets the requirements for accomplishing the concept of design for manufacture. In the future intelligent manufacturing systems (IMS) aimed at systematizing the know-how wilt be used, which will be of particular value in showing how to use knowledge effectively.