v-DESIGN
Various industrial products have got more and more complex to satisfy diversified users’ requirement. It is very important that these products could be manufactured with the minimum number of parts from a manufacturing efficiency point of view. v-DESIGN is a design support system that generates parts specifications from the required product design specifications, defines the parts configuration, and provides feedback to the product design.
In automotive design, for example, there are many options applicable to satisfy the many vehicle specifications and user preferences. The number of combinations is enormous, and the types of parts to meet those specifications are extremely diversified. When the prerequisites for option specifications change due to design changes, the corresponding parts design needs to be changed as well. In addition, when the number of parts increases, it is cmn to reduce the number of parts by substituting low level parts with high level parts to reduce the overall manufacturing cost, taking this management cost into account.
The basic concept of v-DESIGN
v-DESIGN is a design support system that defines the parts configuration of the desired industrial product, optimizes component management costs when necessary.
v-DESIGN offers following benefits :
- Systemize the design of parts combinations with minimum time
- Prevent improper parts configuration
- Minimize product branch numbers caused by slight differences
- Facilitate efficient redesigning capability caused by specifications change and option preference change.
- Minimize "throwaway" parts caused by painful design complexity
- Find how the parts management cost is lowered and the manufacturing cost is minimized, for example, by sharing the parts with “throwaway” parts
Inputs to v-DESIGN are the product specifications and the designer's design intent Outputs from v-DESIGN are the part configuration drawing data, which could be the input data to the Bill of Materials. v-DESIGN acts as a front end system for the Bill of Materials.
