Research on the Model of Product Concurrent Development

Product concurrent development is the key technology to implement Concurrent Engineering (CE), and the model of the process of product concurrent development is a precondition of product concurrent development management. In this paper, the process of product concurrent development is modeled in the views of product, organization, workflow, function, restriction, resource and the models of organization, and its workflow and restriction are studied in detail. IPT (Integrated Product Team) is a general organization for product concurrent development and it is modeled as a matrix. Meanwhile, the workflow is modeled as 8 steps, which are requirement analysis, conceptual design and evaluation, detail design, process planning, production preparation, production and check, product test, product delivery. The model shows that some of these steps can be carried out concurrently. The restrictions in concurrent product development, such as restrictions among IPTs, restrictions among engineers, restrictions among design parameters are studied and it is modeled as hierarchical network.