An innovative scheme for product and process design

In today's faster-paced markets, the focus has shifted to innovation, flexibility and swiftness in terms of product design, process planning, logistics planning and associated supply chain operations. To this end, an innovated scheme for integrated product and process design (ISIPPD) is proposed in this paper with the description of the proposed scheme from the stage of product visualization to process design, with a view to directly generating an optimized process plan based on the product raw data. In this scheme, a neutral data file representing product features is used as the data source for generating the product feature code. Based on such feature coding representation, a detailed process plan can be generated through a process optimization module that incorporates an object-based knowledge system for achieving enhancement in terms of resource allocation. The significance of this research can be shown when various versions of product design with the associated process plans are available for analysis, and benchmarking via an object-based knowledge system, thereby facilitating an integrated product and process design approach. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.