Feature-Based Integration of Product, Process and Resources

The processes currently deployed within the organization of today are being greatly impacted by the demand for drastic reductions in lead-times accompanied by cuts in development and manufacturing costs. Furthermore, the trend towards geographic separation of development and manufacturing facilities and the growing requirement that external partners be seamlessly integrated into internal processes, together with increasing globalisation in manufacturing which necessitates that product design take — often very different — manufacturing conditions into consideration, make the efficient design of both internal and cross-organizational process chains, i.e. comprehensive, complete digital product and production planning, a necessity. The use of features as carriers of descriptive and semantic information within the product development process has led to a substantial decrease in redundant data input and, thus, to a significant reduction in effort and the probability of errors occurring while, at the same time, supporting a product design which is aligned with the manufacturing processes deployed. Supplemented by process data and methods geared for the specification of production aspects and workflows, feature-based process models enhance the transparency of manufacturing capability and resource modelling, thus serving as the foundation for the introduction of new organizational concepts such as simultaneous or concurrent engineering. This work describes the role features play in an organization’s overall process chain: the connection between design, manufacturing and measuring features and their consolidation to a backbone for the continuous flow of information for the complete modelling of the product, the process and the resources.