Abstract
Global competition, customer-driven product customisation, accelerated product obsolescence and continued demands for cost savings are forcing companies to look for new ways of working. Technology advances alone are no longer sufficient to deliver the required improvements to compete and survive in this new environment. Companies need to revise their traditional technologies in a way that allows previously serial engineering tasks to be done concurrently and creates the needed pre-requisites for collaborative working.
Concurrent Engineering can be regarded as a form of process re-engineering and as the main enabling technology ensuring efficient operation of distributed enterprises. Concurrency in performing different design and manufacturing activities presents an opportunity to compress the overall product development time whilst opening up opportunities to be creative by providing more time for design iterations.
This paper describes three different applications of Concurrent Engineering methodology that facilitate collaborative working and sharing and re-use of distributed engineering data. These are:
– an approach for structuring manufacturing information and maximising the information-carrying capacity of 3D CAD models;
– a system for analysing 3D assembly models and extracting assembly related data required for automatic generation of assembly strategies;
– an approach for developing product support systems.
All applications have been developed within the framework of EC-funded projects, in particular: Brite-Euram project CT92–0158 “Advanced Manufacturing Information System for the Designer (AMANIS)”, INCO-Copernicus project CP94–0510 “Advanced Robot Assembly (ROBAS)”, INCO-Copernicus project CP96–0231 “Intelligent Product Manuals (ProManual)” and ERDF (Industrial South Wales) technology demonstration project “Intelligent Product Manuals for SMEs”.
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