Manufacturing-driven design

The past decades have seen significant research and practice on new information technology for manufacturing enterprises, including computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM), concurrent engineering (CE), and agile manufacturing. The ideal is always a pursuit of adaptively integrated design, manufacturing, and business processes linking the parts fabrication, factory production, and product development cycles for the enterprise. The linkage developed thus far, however, tends to be one-directional. For instance, it was emphasized that the manufacturing requirements should be incorporated into design at the design stage which is clearly separated from manufacturing (design for manufacturing). It was not considered that many dynamic enterprises such as original equipment manufacturing (OEM) require a two-directional or even parallel pipelining between design and manufacturing where the feedback of manufacturing to design will be continuous and ongoing, and will be conducted on a real-time and online basis. In such settings, the manufacturing constraints often dominate the design choices and hence drive design. To support this manufacturing-driven design process, a new information technology feeding manufacturing databases back to design systems is required. We propose a new workflow process control system using the metadatabase technology to achieve this end. The new system requires a novel modeling effort to determine the workflow processes and their control knowledge involved so as to connect the traditional technologies (workflow management, knowledge-based systems, and manufacturing and design databases) in the metadatabase model.