The enabling of product information in the conceptual phase

Sammanfattning: It is implied that Functional Products fundamentally change how the product development process is performed in global settings. An extended product definition together with the need to evaluate product properties earlier creates new demands on engineering methods and tools needed during the product development process. A trend is for the customer to want to buy extended solutions provided by many companies in a network. The companies are then forced to cooperate as early as possible in the product development phase to minimize the business risks. Functional products increase the amount of design parameters considered in the conceptual phase. Hardware, manufacturing, service and business parameters are all essential. However, there is a lack of methods to vary the extended set of design parameters in the conceptual design stage. The aerospace industry as well as other manufacturing companies with an increased product complexity develops their offers together globally, meaning that a design parameter can be distributed between several partners. Changing a parameter forces each partner to perform the necessary activities and share the result to gather the overall view. Inserting the functional product perspective into the aerospace industry creates totally new demands on the product development process with a life cycle perspective. Design parameters not normally involved in the early phases should now be considered. The purpose of this research is to develop a method that can enable this extended set of design parameters to be evaluated and manipulated in the early stages of product development. The research strategy is to combine participatory action research process with a case study approach and to verify the approach close to technology and product development activities in industries. The research approach is to combine KBE, CAD and CAE technologies to create a more generative product model, which can automate activities in the conceptual phase of the product development process. Using a generative technical product model that adapts different design parameter settings extends the set of product properties to be evaluated. The generative model can also be used globally and distributed, enabling the evaluation of an extended set of design parameters in a global and distributed conceptual phase. With an increased ability to generate different models more product life cycle properties can be simulated and increase the conceptual information basis. This improves the ability to address product life cycle properties for functional product offers already in the conceptual phase.