Interface diagram: Design tool for supporting the development of modularity in complex product systems

Abstract

For products with a myriad of systems, groups of specialised engineers develop entire technical sub-systems, and great effort is needed to integrate these systems for fulfilling the product’s intended properties describing its purposeful behaviour. This way of developing products gets even more complex when using a mass customisation strategy because standard designs (reusable modules) have to be designed to fit a range of products. This product development set-up requires that engineers working in different technical domains collaborate and are able to share information in a unified way. This article presents a visual design tool –the Interface diagram– which aims to support the engineering process of developing modularity in complex product systems. The tool is a model of a product system representing the arrangement of its elements and their interfaces. The tool has similar characteristics to a high-level product architecture model, aiming at supporting integration of technical sub-systems by documenting interfaces and interactions among components from different functional sub-systems and among different physical modules. One of the objectives for using the design tool is to support the activity of decomposing a product system into modules consisting of components developed by different engineering teams. The usefulness of the Interface diagram has been tested in an industrial development project showing positive results of shortening the lead time and minimising rework. Moreover, the Interface diagram has been used in interplay with a broader Product Lifecycle Management system. This allows the product structures from the Interface diagram to be enriched with detailed product documentation like computer-aided design, requirements, view models, design specifications and interface descriptions.

Keywords

Architecture-based design system design modularisation concurrent engineering Product Lifecycle Management

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Andreasen

(1980) Syntesemetoder på Systemgrundlag – Bidrag Til En Konstruktionsteori. PhD Thesis, Department of Machine Design, Lund Institute of Technology, Lund (in Danish).

Bruun

HPL

Mortensen

(2012a) Modelling and using product architectures in mechatronic product development. In: Norddesign 2012, Aalborg, 22–24 August.

Bruun

HPL

Mortensen

(2012b) Visual product architecture modelling for structuring data in a PLM system. In: PLM12, Montreal, QC, Canada, 9–11 July.

Erixon

(1998) MFD – modular function deployment: a systematic method and procedure for company supportive product modularisation. PhD Thesis, The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Gedell

Michaelis

Johannesson

(2011) Integrated model for co-development of products and production systems-a systems theory approach. Concurrent Engineering: Research Applications 19(2): 139–156.

Hansen

Hvam

Mortensen

(2011) Proactive modeling of product and production architectures. In: Proceedings of 18th ICED 11, Copenhagen, 15–18 August.

Harlou

(2006) Developing product families based on architectures - contribution to a theory of product families. PhD Thesis, DTU Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, 173 pp.

Haskins

(2006) Systems engineering handbook, version 3. INCOSE-TP-2003-002-03, June. San Diego, CA: INCOSE.

Hölttä-Otto

de Weck

(2007) Degree of modularity in engineering systems and products with technical and business constraints. Concurrent Engineering: Research and Applications 15(2): 113–125.

10.

Jiao

Tseng

(2000) Fundamentals of product family architecture. Integrated Manufacturing Systems 11(7): 469–483.

11.

Kvist

(2009) Product family assessment. PhD Thesis, DTU Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby.

12.

Mortensen

Gamillscheg

Bruun

HPL

(2012) Radikal Forenkling via Design. Lyngby: DTU Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark.

13.

Otto

Wood

(2001) Techniques in Reverse Engineering, Systematic Design and New Product Development. New York: Prentice Hall.

14.

Pahl

Beitz

Wallace

(1996) Engineering Design: A Systematic Approach. London: Springer, 544 pp.

15.

Pedersen

(2009) Product platform modeling. PhD Thesis, DTU Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby.

16.

Pimmler

Eppinger

(1994) Integration analysis of product decompositions. USA: Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp.343–351.

17.

Prasad

(1997) Concurrent Engineering Fundamentals: Integrated Product Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR.

18.

Prasad

(1999) Enabling principles of concurrency and simultaneity in concurrent engineering. AI EDAM: Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design Analysis and Manufacturing 13(3): 185–204.

19.

Prasad

Wang

Deng

(1997) Towards a computer-supported cooperative environment for concurrent engineering. Concurrent Engineering: Research Applications 5(3): 233–252.

20.

Rahmani

Thomson

(2011) Managing subsystem interfaces of complex products. International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management 5(1): 73–83.

21.

Sääksvuori

Immonen

(2008) Product Lifecycle Management. Berlin, Heidelberg, Germany: Springer Verlag.

22.

Sanchez

Mahoney

(1997) Modularity, flexibility, and knowledge management in product and organization design. IEEE Engineering Management Review 25(4): 50–61.

23.

Steward

(1981) The design structure system: a method for managing the design of complex systems. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management 28(3): 71–74.

24.

Tjalve

([1976] 1989) Systematisk udformning af industriprodukter. Værktøjer for konstruktøren. København: Akademisk Forlag.

25.

Ulrich

(1995) The role of product architecture in the manufacturing firm. Research Policy 24(3): 419–440.

26.

Ulrich

Eppinger

(2004) Product Design and Development. Boston, MA: Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 366 pp.

27.

Van Veen

Wortmann

(1987) Generic bills of material in assemble-to-order manufacturing. International Journal of Production Research 25(11): 1645–1658.