McKay, A orcid.org/0000-0002-8187-4759, Chau, HH orcid.org/0000-0003-2140-2415, Earl, CF et al. (3 more authors) (2019) A lattice-based approach for navigating design configuration spaces. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 42. 100928. ISSN 1474-0346
Abstract
Design configurations, such as Bills of Materials (BoMs), are indispensable parts of any product development process and integral to the design descriptions stored in proprietary Computer Aided Design and Product Lifecycle Management systems. Engineers use BoMs and other design configurations as lenses to repurpose design descriptions for specific purposes. For this reason, multiple BoMs typically occur in any given product development process. For example, an engineering BoM may be used to define a configuration that best supports a design activity whereas a manufacturing BoM may be used to define the configuration of parts that best supports a manufacturing process. Current practice for the definition of BoMs involves the use of indented parts lists and dendograms that are prone to error because it is easy to create discrepancies across BoMs that, in essence, are defined through collections of part identifiers such as names and part numbers. Such errors have a significant detrimental effect on the performance of product development processes by creating the need for rework, adding costs and increasing time to market.
This paper introduces a design description capability that ensures consistency across BoMs for a given design. A boolean hypercube lattice is used to define a design configuration space that includes all possible configurations for a given design description. Valid operations within the space are governed by the mathematics of hypercube lattices. The design description capability is demonstrated through an early engineering design configuration software tool that offers significant benefits by ensuring consistency across the BoMs for a given design. The software uses and generates design descriptions that are exported from and imported to commercially available design systems through a standard (ISO 10303-214) interface format. In this way, potential for early impact on industry practice is high.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Design description; Design representation; Design structure; Design language; Bill of materials; Hypercube lattice |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Computing (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Mechanical Engineering (Leeds) > Institute of Engineering Systems and Design (iESD) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) EP/N005694/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 07 Jun 2019 11:26 |
Last Modified: | 17 Jun 2020 20:16 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.aei.2019.100928 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:147045 |