Integrated product and process modeling for collaborative design environment

Concurrent engineering (CE) has been widely accepted as an effective engineering practice for decreasing product development time, improving quality, decreasing manufacturing costs, and improving customer satisfaction. Since CE philosophy is intended to consider all elements of product life cycle from the outset, CE approach increases the complexity of design problem and makes it more difficult to manage. In addition, the advances in computer networks and information technology have brought engineering design into a new era. Although a considerable number of studies have been made on design decomposition (e.g., product and process (or perspective) decomposition) as a means to reduce the complexity of a large scale design problem, relatively little attention has been given to the computational framework for dynamic and systematic design integration in a computer network-oriented design environment. This paper describes an integrated product and process modeling (IPPM) framework for collaborative product design through the Internet. Here, the hierarchical and heterarchical dependencies between the decomposed smaller design problems are addressed. An agent-based approach is proposed for the computer support of hierarchical and heterarchical design topologies. In our framework, a smaller design problem is dynamically modeled in terms of interacting and pluggable design agents that represent a specific aspect of the design problem and provide the interoperability between heterogeneous design agents or software applications, and the results of these smaller problems are recursively integrated to formulate solutions to the larger problems in a systematic manner. Finally, the proposed framework forms a global design network through which a number of design possibilities are explored.