Know-How Reuse in the Conceptual Design Phase of Complex Engineering Products Or: 'Are you still constructing manually or do you already generate automatically?

摘要

Shortening the design cycle, faster time-to-market, reduction of development costs, more intelligent products and intelligent production are the buzzwords which characterize the current trends in our industries subject to global competition. While in the past many downstream activities in engineering design and mass production have already been subject to automation and are nowadays substituted by robots or software, only little support is currently available for the engineer in the conceptual design phases. Most upstream design activities, i.e. from the initial product idea until the creation of the digital models which represent the blueprint of the final product, still mainly rely on human labor and change management. Design languages possess the potential to fill this gap by offering the engineer a very flexible way to express the know-how about the design object and the design process. Design object means all aspects proper to the parts of a product, while design process means all aspects of thought processes, compromises and intermediate decision making which occurs during the process. Design languages offer automatic translation into all kinds of digital models, and, if properly designed, automatic compilation under a large variety of topological and parametrical variations of requirements or boundary conditions, thus leading to different product designs and know-how reuse in the conceptual design of complex engineering products.