2011 Volume 62 Issue 3 Pages 95-105
As products and component lifecycles are shortened and product lines become more diversified recently, many manufacturing industries have started to adopt the concepts of product platform and concurrent engineering. Companies are faced with the issues of provide product lines that meet market needs while shortening the product development process and reducing development costs. For concurrent engineering, it is essential to exchange information among relative departments and to visualize the cross-relationship of restrictions and concerns in the product design process. This study aims to visualize the functional design processes in product developments using the information such as designers' knowledge of product design in a case study on multi-product lines of vending machine. The research was conducted on a joint basis, working with universities and a vending machine manufacturer. Furthermore, applying IDEF0, functional design procedures and sequences are organized for vending machine product lines and methods are introduced to describe the processes undertaken to design main products and to generalize those procedures based on the descriptions of multi-product lines.
