Data and knowledge management technologies are of strategic importance for industrial innovation, provided they are integrated in the company processes, in the organisational structure, and can be flexibly adapted to company evolution. In particular the Product Development Process (PDP) of manufacturing companies, requires the efficient management of huge amounts of data from different sources and their integration in the sub-processes that compose the product chain. The efficient use of information lifecycle, by the large adoption of virtual testing and by the inter-functional management of related data in the product management would become a strategic advantage for the innovation race. Present ICT solutions separately address parts of product development, but an integrated approach that includes data and services required for the whole Product Development Process does not yet exist.
iProd will improve the efficiency and quality of the Product Development Process developing a flexible, service oriented, customer driven software framework that will be the backbone of computer systems associated with current and new development processes. To achieve these goals, iProd will rely on knowledge management (KM), knowledge based engineering (KBE) and process integration and automation technologies.
iProd will assume the challenge of complexity, semantic diversity and richness of content establishing semantically rich, open and transparent methodologies that will enable knowledge workers from aerospace, automotive and home appliances industries to manage product and process complexity, managing “higher value information” like functional specifications, requirements, decision rationale and engineering and business knowledge in general. This knowledge base along with a reasoning engine will support information sharing, collaboration across companies, common understanding of PDP among different industries and will promote efficient decision taking.
This framework will impact the product development process in order to reduce drastically product development costs by means of an optimised testing process, support knowledge and competencies extraction, structuring and sharing also with suppliers, improve focus of new product development with a fast and structured management of competitor and market analysis data.
LMS International (Belgium) is coordinating the iProd Project. The project is organized in 6 work-packages. The work packages structure is as follows:
Management
Work package leader:LMS
Objectives
The main goal of this work package is to make sure that the objectives of the project are achieved according to the time and budget but with the expected effectiveness and quality. This goal involves controlling the progress of the project in terms of technical quality of the results according to the established objectives as well as fulfilling the chronological schedule according to the defined deliverables.
Tasks
Work in this work package has been divided into 3 tasks:
Task 1.1 Day-to-day Management
Task 1.2 Administrative and financial coordination
Task 1.3 Communication, Quality and Risk management
Framework Requirements
Work package leader: FHG
This WP will achieve the following objectives:
O2.1 Building of a deep understanding of Product Development Processes in the three domains: automotive, aerospace and home appliances. Deep understanding in this context means the process models including all performed activities, involved actors (workers, suppliers etc.), tools, structured and unstructured data, data formats as well as the interrelations and communication models.
O2.2 Identification of commonalities and diversities of the examined product development processes, in order to have clear ideas of what has to be designed in the kernel and what has to be integrated as domain modules.
O2.3 Development and establishment of a common methodology for PDP analysis.
O2.4 Definition of functional requirements for the application domains aerospace, automotive, home appliances.
O2.5 Integration of functional requirements towards a set of requirements for iProd kernel and domain modules.
Tasks
Work in this work package has been divided into 3 tasks:
Task 2.1 Common Methodology for PDP Analysis
Task 2.2 Identification of Functional PDP Requirements
Task 2.3 Integration of Functional PDP Requirements
Framework Design
Work package leader: EPFL
This work package focuses on the design of the two main modules, the Kernel and the Domain Services. Referring to what explained in section 1.1.4 and showed in Figure 6, the components that will be implemented in the Kernel and the Domain services relate to the Knowledge Base, the Reasoning Engine and the Integration Infrastructure. This logic and implementation scheme is also reflected in the deliverables. It can be noticed that there are deliverables on the Kernel and the Domain Services as well as on the Knowledge Base, the Reasoning Engine and the Integration Infrastructure. This is motivated by the complexity of the framework and addresses the two most important point of views: the PDP point of view and the IT point of view. In order to give a complete and exhaustive description of the framework design, deliverables covering both point of views will be prepared.
The following objectives will be achieved within this WP:
O3.1 This WP has the objective to provide a detailed architectural design for the whole engineering framework. In order to achieve maximum flexibility of the approach, the first step is to model and design common functionalities which are made of the following blocks: knowledge base, Reasoning engine, Integration Framework, Operative Services and Common Interfaces.
O3.2 The second step is related to the design of the specific services (for each manufacturing domain) , and interfaces towards the kernel
O3.3 Design of Architecture of the Framework integration
O3.4 Development of the integrating ontology as a set of sub-ontologies
Tasks
Work in this work package has been divided into 2 tasks:
Task 3.1 Kernel Design
Task 3.1.1 Knowledge Base
Task 3.1.2 Reasoning Engine
Task 3.1.3 Integration Framework
Task 3.1.4 Operative Services
Task 3.2 Task 3.2 Domain Services Design
Task 3.2.1 Domain Knowledge Base
Task 3.2.2 Domain KBE for virtual execution
Framework Development
Work package leader:LMS
The aim of this work package is to perform the software implementation of the framework that has been designed in WP3. The whole WP4 will be dedicated to software development according to the design rules. In particular, the kernel and the domain services components will be implemented.
The objectives of this work package are:
O4.1: The first objective of this work package is the software implementation of the kernel component designed in WP3.
O4.2: The second objective is to implement the domain services designed in WP3 and needed for the application use cases defined in WP2 and that will be implemented in WP5.
Achieving this objectives will allow the consortium to develop prototypes of the framework.
Tarks
Work in this work package has been divided into 2 tasks:
Task 4.1 Kernel Development
Task 4.2 Domain Services Development
Framework demonstration
Work package leader: ALESSI
The objectives of this WP are:
O5.1: The first objective of this work package is the implementation of the three application cases identified in WP2 with the deployment of the three iProd software framework prototypes in order to demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness and the advantages of iProd.
O5.2: The second objective is the creation of a proper validation methodology in order to give a common approach for testing the different use cases and making them comparable in terms of advantages and benefits achieved with iProd.
Tasks
Work in this work package has been divided into 5 tasks:
Task 5.1 Validation methodology definition
Task 5.2 Aerospace use case development
Task 5.3 Automotive use case development
Task 5.4 Home Appliances use cases
Task 5.5 Testing and final validation
Dissemination & Exploitation
Work package leader: CIDAUT
In this work package the dissemination of the project results, their exploitation and exposure to the industrial community will be done. A number of actions will be implemented to facilitate the dissemination of the project achievements, especially from the methodological point of view. Focus will be also particularly put on the exposure of the project results to the industrial community with the “iProd industrial user group” initiative. Moreover, iProd will identify in this work package possible contribution to standards with recommendations, guidelines, best practices and possible proposals for new standards together with improvements/extensions of current standards. Additionally, expertise from SCAIP will be leveraged to create a proper dissemination activity towards East Europe through the Polish Market specificity.
The objectives are:
O6.1: Dissemination: to communicate the project results reaching the European scientific and research communities so the project results could be used and become the basis for further research. The project results will also be communicated to European Aeronautic, Automotive and Home appliance industries in order to easy the exploitation stage.
O6.2: Exploitation and Industrial Involvement: In order to fully achieve the call expected impact, project results will be exploited within the consortium by means of the user group initiative and involving main Industrial partners from automotive, aeronautic and home appliances markets.
Tasks
Work in this work package has been divided into 4 tasks:
