CONCEPTUAL DESIGN USING GENERIC OBJECT INHERITANCE

摘要

Conceptual design for complex products like aircraft and power plants requires a considerable effort since the product models become very large if they are to cover all important aspects for different stakeholders. To cope with this overall effort, designers have to rely on legacy designs and reuse, and improve the product concepts incrementally between product generations.rnThis paper describes a generalized inheritance mechanism we call generic object inheritance that enables quick reuse and modification of conceptual product models at any level in their hierarchical break down structures. By facilitating reuse of conceptual models of previously well studied products, more time can be spent on developing the parts that contain the edge of a new product generation. This enables keeping the modified concepts in context of a complete analyzable product model where the impact of changes can be studied without having to maintain multiple copies of the same object structures.rnThe paper describes how generic object inheritance is used for developing the next version of a conceptual product model of a small business jet, while reusing the essential parts of the previous version with minor modifications to design parameters and substructures.rnThe design and core mechanisms of generic object inheritance are briefly described, and illustrated with examples from the case study.