Design and development of reconfigurable product data management system for integrated product and process development

Today's manufacturers provide integrated product process development from product design, prototyping, production and finally to marketing and sales. The demand of customers are diversifies and changes occurs frequently after placing the order. Manufacturing firms need to cope with the variety of its environmental needs and uncertainties and response to the changes rapidly. In this paper, a reconfigurable product data management system which is composed a set of multitasking agents for dealing with engineering problem for solving processes in complex and inter-related operations. In order to response to the rapid change of production environment or market trend, the intelligent operation is embedded in agents such that it can provide advice for the design engineers to resolve the engineering problem and minimize the ripple effect caused by sudden changes. The intelligent operation is an artificial intelligent problem solving technique, case based reasoning, which retrieves the past most similar case by weighting various problem parameter and then adapts the past solution for the novel problem.