A Contribution to MBSE-supported Modeling in Product-Production-CoDesign

This article emphasizes the challenges faced by manufacturers in meeting customer demands for complex products while maintaining cost efficiency and operational flexibility. It argues for a shift towards integrated product and production system development to address these system complexities. Traditionally, product development and production planning have been siloed functions, leading to inefficiencies and issues like extended lead times and cost overruns. The concept of Product-Production-CoDesign (PPCD) was introduced to address this issue and identifies increasing system complexity as a major challenge in future manufacturing, with a lack of support from Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) methods. This paper presents an activity-based MBSE methodology to support seamless coordination between product design and production processes. Relevant modeling activities from industrial practice are identified and arranged in a framework. Subsequently, views are developed that enable model-based support in the execution of the activities. Finally, the identified activities and views are implemented using the real example of a production system in the automotive sector.