Systems engineering methods for multidisciplinary product definition

Abstract

Integration of engineering activities from first idea to recycling of product yielded product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. Classical PLM system relies upon highly integrated physical level model of product. This integration does not support multidisciplinary product engineering because capability of classical PLM modeling can not provide the demanded unified modeling mechanism for different engineering areas. The main cause of this situation is lack of method for system level modeling of product in PLM system. In order to solve this problem, the requirements (R) functional (F), logical (L) and physical (P) structure based product definition was included in leading PLM systems during the recent years. However, conventional human dialogue is not well appropriate for processing the huge amount of information at the very complex RFLP structure element definition. New procedures are demanded for contextual element generation. Fortunately, RFLP based PLM systems offer open architecture functionality to accommodate this extension. This paper is about the main information flow aspect of the new coordinated request based product modeling (CRPM) method to automate the knowledge and decision intensive RFLP element definition. The CRPM method applies modified variant of a previous multilevel abstraction method. This abstraction and the new RFLP element definition methodologies were developed at the Laboratory of Intelligent Engineering Systems (LIES), Óbuda University.