Integrated Design System: An Information Processing Approach for Knowledge-Based Product Development

Abstract

The rapid development of computing technology has facilitated its use in engineering design and manufacturing at an increasing rate. To deliver high quality, low cost products with reduced lead times; companies are focussing their efforts on leveraging this technology through the development of knowledge-based systems such as an integrated design system (IDS). An IDS, which can also be referred to as a design information system, is a part of the overall enterprise information system framework, and plays an important role in improving competitiveness in product development oriented companies. Such a system addresses concurrent engineering (CE) issues by considering downstream aspects of different phases in the product life cycle as early as possible in the design stage. These aspects include production process planning and realisation, manufacturing and assembly resources, maintainability, costing and other factors. Both human expertise and downstream aspects predominantly consist of information that is descriptive. This chapter discusses the structure and development of a design information system that can convert this descriptive information into forms that are suitable for embedding within decision-making algorithms. Information in such a system is sorted in terms of its nature into three groups: input data information, constraint information and objective information, all having different representations. Information is also mapped to the relevant design objectives and ranked in importance to facilitate the trade-off analysis after a series of processing activities.