Methods and Tools for Co-operative and Integrated Design

SMC COLOMBIER FONTAINE is a company in the AFE METAL group, which uses a sand casting process to manufacture steel primary parts. To reduce the "time to market", primary part producers need to reduce the time and cost of the industrialisation process. These factors, in addition to the global goal of improving process performance levels, brought SMC to develop numerical technologies and traceability from quotation to part delivery [1]. Nowadays, these improvements are incorporated into company culture. The next step in reducing the time and cost of the production process is to introduce a complete methodology of use and experience feedback of these new models and methods. To be able to generalise this approach, a CAD methodology is essential and thus becomes a step in the industrialisation process. The amount of improvements engendered by the numerical technologies largely justifies the time investment made to obtain a numerical definition of all the different elements in the sand casting process [2]. The objective of our approach is to optimise the product and its production process by generating a complete numerical reference, through the integration of quotation, CAD, simulation, new manufacturing technologies and effective production processes.

Contenu
Collaborative large engineering: from IT dream to reality.- From design to life-cycle approaches: the EU perspective.- A modular framework for the economic performance control in manufacturing segments. A life cycle oriented approach.- Quotation for the value added assessment during product development and production processes.- Man-machine system re-design from the ergonomics perspective. A new methodology for production system optimization.- Contribution to the building of an equipment design method in developing countries using an analysis of traditional practices.- Manufacturing process selection and integration in product design. Analysis and synthesis approaches.- Integrating kinematics and physically-based simulation in a car sunroof virtual prototyping.- Sharing computational simulation knowledge for co-operative work in the design process.- Surface reconstruction of freeform objects based on multiresolution volumetric method for distributed CAD.- The feature-based styling process in car body engineering. Introducing styling features.- A new design orientated digitilization technology. Integration of the conceptual design into the design process.- Applicability of engineering design theories on manufacturing system design in the context of concurrent engineering.- Image theory in integrated product and process design.- Conceptual design in a high-tech environment.- Adaptive and competent network structures for the development and design of high-tech products.- Managing uncertainty of product data. An enhancement on constraint programming techniques.- Integration of new dimensions in design process. Application to the environmental dimension.- Environment and design. Towards methods and tools for integration and co-operation.- Excellency in industrial product development. A promising way to success.- A proposition to capitalize and share the logic of design.- A design environment for product knowledge management and data exchange.- Flexible software framework for collaboration systems.- A cooperative system for the design of the mechatronic products with multidisciplinary optimisation.- Assembly simulation in the design process in a distributed environment.- New application areas of digital mock-up within product development.- Interface between CAD/CAM software and an integrative engineering design environment.- Modelling of participatory manufacturing process.- Collaborative development of tools and dies in SMEs networks.- Evaluation of the element model working surface pairs & channel and support structures. The evaluation of a new scientific approach for the training of creative engineers and scientists.- Communicating context and strategy for collaborative design in networks and corporations.- If only I knew what you were going to do. Communication and planning in large organizations.- Co-operation and co-ordination during the design process. Empirical studies and characterization.- Supporting global design teams through virtual design offices.- Distributed design Current approaches and evolution tendencies. Designing with internet.- Case study on low cost distributed conceptual design support for small teams.- Ship optimisation with distant application tools.- Interoperability between CAD and simulation models for cooperative design.- Verification of human factors in manufacturing process design. A virtual experimentation approach.- Towards a formalization of collaboration entities to manage conflicts appearing in cooperative product design.- Authors index.