Rapid One-of-a-kind Product Development

The book will discuss our research in developing new technologies for supporting small and medium companies. Scientific advancements to be presented include a novel product data modelling scheme to model product design, manufacturability and knowledge under a common data object. This scheme will lead to the development of new knowledge with regard to modelling customised products of different types, represent a product together with its manufacturing constraints, and digitally store and reuse them as knowledge for new product development. The research towards computer aided customer interface will lead to new ways of translating Customer Requirements (CRs) to technical attributes, which allows CRs and changes to be processed and integrated with technical designs in real time. The research towards adaptive and concurrent CAD methods and algorithms will generate new knowledge about how to evaluate a project design in terms of cost, manufacturability and profitability while meeting customer requirements and expectations. A novel adaptive scheduling method will be developed to optimally produce a wide variety of customised products taking into consideration all of the possible changes from customers and uncertainties in manufacturing. The book demonstrates how to develop adaptive production scheduling methods in mass customisation environment, how to understand and best produce a product, how to better manage and produce a variety of customised products, and how to design production lines and use them efficiently for developing highly customised products.

This overview of research into enabling technologies for small and medium-sized companies presents the latest scientific advances and demonstrates how to develop new methods, tools and algorithms to address the problems inherent in mass customisation.

1. Motivation and Background.- 2. Review of Rapid OKP Product Development.- 3. Recent Development on Product Modelling.- 4. Integrated Product Development System for Rapid Product Development.- 5 Compound Method to Speed up the Sheet Metal Part/Product Development.- 7. Generic Product Modelling Framework.- 8. EXPRESS Data Model.- 9. Generic Product Modelling Framework: Case Study.- 10. Information Framework for Rapid Product Development.- 11.- Product Development Cost Estimation and Optimisation.- 12. Integrated Data Structure for Supporting Rapid Product Development.- 13. Product Information Management System for Rapid and Integrated Mould Product Development.- 14. Internet Based DFX for Rapid Tool/Mould Making.- 15. Management of Product Process Knowledge in OKP Enterprises.- 16. Conclusions and Future Work.