TOWARDS A UNIFIED DESCRIPTION OF PRODUCT RELATED PROCESSES

Article type: Research Article

Authors: van der Vegte, Wilhelm F. (Wilfred) | Vergeest, Joris S.M. | Horváth, Imre

Affiliations: Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Design Engineering and Production Delft, The Netherlands

Abstract: To increase the effectiveness of computer support in development and production of durable industrial products (artifacts), three problems still need to be solved: (a) integration of aspect models used in artifact development, (b) integration of the aspect models used in process planning and process representations, (c) integration of (a) and (b). This seems to be difficult, since different application fields, representation techniques and information contents have to be combined. It means that instead of the pure artifact and process models, we have to develop artifact-process models. This article focuses on the integration of four kinds of typical life-cycle processes: (1) design (mental creation processes), (2) producing (physical creation processes), (3) operation processes (internal behavioral processes), and (4) use processes (external behavioral processes). In order to achieve a sufficiently high level of formalization in the computer-mediated handling of various processes, this article introduces a set-theory based representation. This representation makes it possible to stereotype the observed or forecasted processes, largely independent of their content. The applicability of the approach in real-life cases is demonstrated by three examples. Further research is oriented to the integration of process modeling with artifact modeling, as well as application to more complex cases.

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 53-63, 2001