Digital Factory Wizard: An integrated system for concurrent digital engineering in product lifecycle management

Product lifecycle management (PLM) systems provide a useful function with regard to creating and managing product data. But, because current PLM systems are based on individual functions and because of distributed information management, it takes a lot of time and effort to collect data as well as analyse engineering planning data. Therefore, it is difficult to achieve an integrated engineering environment and share information across departments or enterprises in the environment of current PLM systems. Moreover, current PLM systems have concentrated on design and engineering, i.e. design production and the management of design data. Manufacturing engineering, such as layout design, is not a focal point in current PLM systems. Hence, to achieve an integrated and concurrent engineering environment, the authors propose a new concept, the digital factory wizard (DFW), in a PLM environment. The DFW provides interoperability across heterogeneous systems and integrated information management as well as facilitates information utilisation based on the concept proposed in this research. The DFW is composed of four modules: integrated standard schema (ISS), PLM Integrator, layout builder (LB) and simulation builder (SB). The ISS defines a common data type and structure for supporting interoperability. For supporting automatic information exchange through the ISS, the PLM integrator has been developed. The third module is LB. It helps to generate a factory layout using managed information in PLM systems. Finally, the function of SB is the automatic generation of a simulation model. The final part of the article suggests implementations and presents a case study to show that the implementation of an effective, reliable and interoperable engineering environment is possible, and can be performed in a concurrent and integrated manner.