This introductory book discusses how to plan and build useful, reliable, maintainable and cost efficient computer systems for automated engineering design. The book takes a user perspective and seeks to bridge the gap between texts on principles of computer science and the user manuals for commercial design automation software. The approach taken is top-down, following the path from definition of the design task and clarification of the relevant design knowledge to the development of an operational system well adapted for its purpose. This introductory text for the practicing engineer working in industry covers most vital aspects of planning such a system. Experiences from applications of automated design systems in practice are reviewed based on a large number of real, industrial cases. The principles behind the most popular methods in design automation are presented with sufficient rigour to give the user confidence in applying them on real industrial problems. This book is also suited for a half semester course at graduate level and has been complemented by suggestions for student assignments grown out of the lecture notes of two postgraduate courses given annually or biannually during the last ten years at the Product development program at the School of Engineering at Jönköping University.

Many companies base their business strategy on customized products with a high level of variety and continuous functional improvements. For companies to be able to provide affordable products in a short time and be at the competitive edge, every new design must be adapted to existing production facilities. In order to ensure this, collaboration between engineering design and production engineering has to be supported. With the dispersed organisations of today combined with the increasing amount of information that has to be shared and managed, this collaboration is a critical issue for many companies.

In this article, an approach for sharing and managing product and production information is introduced. The results are based on the experiences from a case study at a car manufacturer. By ontology-based integration, work within domains engineering design, production engineering and requirement management at the company was integrated. The main objectives with the integration were: support the formation of requirement specifications for products and processes, improve and simplify the information retrieval for designers and process planners, ensure traceability from changes in product systems to manufacturing systems and vice versa, and finally, eliminate redundant or multiple versions of requirement specifications.

With today’s high product variety and shorter life cycles in automobile manufacturing, every new car design must be adapted to existing production facilities so that these facilities can be used for the manufacturing of several car models. In order to ensure this, collaboration between engineering design and production engineering has to be supported. Sharing information is at the core of collaborative engineering. By implementing an ontology approach, work within domains requirement management, engineering design and production engineering can be integrated. An ontology approach, based on an information model implemented in a computer tool, supports work in the different domains and their collaboration. The main objectives of the proposed approach are: supporting the formation of requirement specifications for products and processes, improved and simplified information retrieval for designers and process planners, forward traceability from changes in product systems to manufacturing systems, backward traceability from changes in manufacturing system to product systems, and the elimination of redundant or multiple versions of requirement specifications by simplifying the updating and maintenance of the information.

Automated systems for variant design can be used for design iterations in order to guide the designer towards solutions that are optimized with respect to weight, cost, lead time, or other vital properties. In this work such a system for computational design problems is presented together with examples of its application. The system performs design computations, computed aided design model configuration, production process planning, and cost estimation. The design rules and algorithms are captured in knowledge "chunks," which are human readable as well as computer executable. The workflow governing the execution of these rules and algorithms is created using a dependency structure matrix (DSM) which is included in the system. Particular attention has been given to the need for transparency, modularity, and longevity of the system, which is a prerequisite for such a system to become a viable tool in industrial applications. Experiences from the proposed system indicate that the DSM workflow manager in combination with a human readable and modularized knowledge base provides clarity and transparency for both developer and user of the system.

For parts suppliers in the manufacturing industry the process of preliminary production preparation and subsequent calculation of offers are critical business activities. A vital part of production preparation is the design of fixtures and tooling necessary for many processes of metal forming. For a company to give quick responses to customer enquiries, or changes in prior specifications, it would be highly beneficial with a degree of automation in this design process. This implies the development of a computer based system able to capture existing design procedures and associated knowledge for the classes of tooling required for the forming process.

In this work we exemplify an automated design system for tooling by an implementation for rotary draw bending of aluminium tubing. The system is based on established design practice and heuristic knowledge developed over many years of practical experience. The system will evaluate whether a given specification is producible with existing materials and equipment, select suitable machine, determine process parameters and determine type and dimensions of components of form die, clamp die, follower or pressure die, wiper and mandrel. The system is built on readily available commercial software packages. When building a system of this kind it is essential that the knowledge documentation and structure is such that the functions of the system can be easily understood by the users of the system and by future developers. Aspects of user friendliness, transparency and scalability are addressed in the summary of this paper.

With today’s high product variety and shorter life cycles in motor car manufacture, every new car design must be adapted to existing production facilities so that these can be used for several car models. Sharing information is at the core of collaborative engineering. With an ontology approach, the work within the domains requirement management, engineering design and production engineering can be integrated. An ontology approach based on an information model implemented in a computer tool supports the work in the different domains and their collaboration. In our work we make use of the existing structures and link those using appropriately named links. We also propose the introduction of a new structure describing the generic functions of the manufacturing system, MSF. This tree structure is a suitable tool to link product related objects to their associated production equipment at varying levels of detail. The manufacturing requirements are modelled using a concept for the definition of the requirement content, called Manufacturing Requirement (MR). To enable the MR to cover different ranges and levels, and enhance the maintenance of the system integrity, the concept of Requirement Object is introduced. The RO is used to collect the instances for which a specific MR is valid. We also use the rule inference facility to reduce the number of explicitly defined relations.