4 Modeling of Integrated Product Development Processes

The development process has to be modeled and documented for its reengineering and continuous improvement. A development process model is the basis for how a system will be designed. Due to the special nature of integrated product development processes, a method for process modeling has to be able to support and easily map the high interconnectivity between processes of different engineering disciplines over all hierarchies. The dominant elements in a model of integrated product development processes are the informational relations and flows. The analysis of models and textual documentation of the engineering processes in an automotive company revealed the special need for modeling concurrent engineering processes. Existing methods didn't support these needs sufficiently. Therefore, a single method for mapping and interconnecting the processes of all different engineering disciplines was agreed upon, which describes inputs and outputs (e.g. informational objects) for every process. The paper describes the reasons for an engineering process driven modeling method, the method itself and its application. Also, lessons learned from this approach are described.