Providing support to the product design group for achieving variety control

• S. Kumar ^[2] ; C. Chandra ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

     University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

     City of Ann Arbor, Estados Unidos

     
  2. [2] University of St. Tomas (USA)
• Localización: Journal of Engineering Design, ISSN 0954-4828, Vol. 12, Nº. 4, 2001, págs. 373-387
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • As new products are designed, parts proliferation can be controlled by providing the design engineer with a list of parts similar to the new part being designed to decide whether one of the existing parts can be used as a substitute. The product data management (PDM) system is a valuable tool for engineers to manage both data and the product development process. The system has broad classification capability. However, it is not geared to retrieving a small set of existing parts with similar or closer design and/or manufacturing attributes for review and evaluation by the design engineer, when initiating design of a new part for a product. An attribute-based classification scheme is developed to retrieve a subset of parts similar to the new proposed design. The input to the proposed approach is group technology codes, which provide important design and manufacturing information for parts. The Principal Components Analysis technique is used to generate principal components, with fewer components explaining the major portion of total variance in values of attributes. Grouping of parts on design similarity criteria is performed hierarchically using these principal components. An outline for the operational usage of these similar classes for variety control is presented. The proposed classification and retrieval module should be a part of the PDM software.