Abstract
Concurrent Engineering is a methodology that allows designers and manufacturing engineers to work in parallel, or concurrently, during various stages of product design and manufacturing. This paper proposes a concurrent design method for mechanical systems that utilizes operator-acting modules. In this method, in order to simplify the system being considered, it is first divided into modules, and then the modules' specifications are changed via operators, which act to expand the design space. By using simple modules to express the mechanical system, several stages of design and the attendant manufacturing variables can be treated within the modules concurrently and in parallel, so that high performance and high quality machine products can be realized in a short time. The proposed method is applied to the design of a material handling manipulator consisting of several links, and the validity of this design method is discussed.
