Computer-aided production engineering (CAPE) is a relatively new and significant branch of engineering. Global manufacturing has changed the environment in which goods are produced. Meanwhile, the rapid development of electronics and communication technologies has required design and manufacturing to keep pace.
CAPE is seen as a new type of computer-aided engineering environment which will improve the productivity of manufacturing/industrial engineers. This environment would be used by engineers to design and implement future manufacturing systems and subsystems. Work is currently underway at the United States National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on CAPE systems. The NIST project is aimed at advancing the development of software environments and tools for the design and engineering of manufacturing systems.
The future of manufacturing will be determined by the efficiency with which it can incorporate new technologies. The current process in engineering manufacturing systems is often ad hoc, with computerized tools being used on a limited basis. Given the costs and resources involved in the construction and operation of manufacturing systems, the engineering process must be made more efficient. New computing environments for engineering manufacturing systems could help achieve that objective.
Why is CAPE important? In much the same way that product designers need computer-aided design systems, manufacturing and industrial engineers need sophisticated computing capabilities to solve complex problems and manage the vast data associated with the design of a manufacturing system.
In order to solve these complex problems and manage design data, computerized tools must be used in the application of scientific and engineering methods to the problem of the design and implementation of manufacturing systems. Engineers must address the entire factory as a system and the interactions of that system with its surrounding environment. Components of a factory system include:
CAPE must not only be concerned with the initial design and engineering of the factory, it must also address enhancements over time. CAPE should support standard engineering methods and problem-solving techniques, automate mundane tasks, and provide reference data to support the decision-making process.
The environment should be designed to help engineers become more productive and effective in their work. This would be implemented on personal computers or engineering workstations which have been configured with appropriate peripheral devices. Engineering tool developers will have to integrate the functions and data used by a number of different disciplines, for example:
Many of the methods, formulas, and data associated with these technical areas currently exist only in engineering handbooks. Although some computerized tools are available, they are often very specialized, difficult to use, and do not share information or work together. Engineering tools built by different vendors must be made compatible through open systems architectures and interface standards.
CAPE will be based on computer systems that provide an integrated set of design and engineering tools. These software tools will be used by a company's manufacturing engineers to continuously improve its production systems. They will maintain information about manufacturing resources, enhance production capabilities, and develop new facilities and systems. Engineers working on different workstations will share information through a common database.
Using CAPE, an engineering team will prepare detailed plans and working models for an entire factory in a matter of days. Alternative solutions to production problems could be quickly developed and evaluated. This would be a significant improvement over current manual methods which may require weeks or months of intensive activity.
To achieve this goal, a new set of engineering tools are needed. Examples of functions which should be supported include:
The tools implementing these functions must be highly automated and integrated; and will need to provide quick access to a wide range of data. This data must be maintained in a format that is accessible and usable by the engineering tools. Some examples of the information that might be contained in these electronic libraries include:
These on-line libraries would allow engineers to quickly develop solutions based upon the work of others.
Another critical aspect of this engineering environment is affordability, which can best be achieved by designing an environment that can be constructed from low cost "off-the-shelf" commercial products, rather than custombuilt computer hardware and software. The basic engineering environment must be affordable. For both cost and technical reasons, it must be designed to be able to support incremental upgrades. Incremental upgrades would allow companies to add capabilities as they are needed. Commercial software products must be easy to install and integrate with other software already in use. These capabilities exist to a limited extent in some general purpose commercial software today, e.g., word processors, databases, spreadsheets.
Many technical issues must be considered in the design and development of new engineering tools for CAPE. These issues include:
There are three critical elements to be addressed: creating a common manufacturing systems information model; using an engineering life cycle approach; and developing a software tool integration framework.
Resolution of these elements will help ensure that independently developed systems will be able to work together. The common information model should identify the elements of the manufacturing system and their relationships to each other; the functions or processes performed by each element; the tools, materials, and information required to perform those functions; and measures of effectiveness for the model and its component elements.
There have been many efforts over the years to develop information models for different aspects of manufacturing, but no known existing model fully meets the needs of a CAPE ernviroment. Therefore, a life cycle approach is needed to identify the different processes that a CAPE environment must support, and must define all phases of a manufacturing system or subsystem's existence. Some of the major phases which may be included in a system life cycle approach are, requirements identification; system design specification; vendor selection; system development and upgrades; installation, testing, training; and benchmarking of production operations.
Management, coordination, and administration functions need to be performed during each phase of the life cycle. Phases may be repeated over time as a system is upgraded or re-engineered to meet changing needs or incorporate new technologies.
A software tool integration framework should specify how the tools could be independently designed and developed. The framework would define how CAPE tools would deal with common services, interact with each other and coordinate problem solving activities. Although some existing software products and standards currently address the common services issue, the problem of tool interaction remains largely unsolved. The problem of tool interaction is not limited to the domain of computer-aided manufacturing systems engineering—it is pervasive across the software industry.
An initial CAPE environment has been established from commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software packages. This new environment is being used to demonstrate commercially available tools to perform CAPE functions, to develop a better understanding and define functional requirements for individual engineering tools and the overall environment, and to identify the integration issues which must be addressed to implement compatible environments in the future.
Several engineering demonstrations using COTS tools are under development. These demonstrations are designed to illustrate the various types of functions that must be performed in engineering a manufacturing system.
Functions supported by the current COTS environment include: system specification/diagramming, process flowcharting, information modeling, computer-aided design of products, plant layout, material flow analysis, ergonomic workplace design, mathematical modeling, statistical analysis, line balancing, manufacturing simulation, investment analysis, project management, knowledge-based system development, spreadsheets, document preparation, user interface development, document illustration, forms and database management.
Engineering statistics combines engineering and statistics using scientific methods for analyzing data. Engineering statistics involves data concerning manufacturing processes such as: component dimensions, tolerances, type of material, and fabrication process control. There are many methods used in engineering analysis and they are often displayed as histograms to give a visual of the data as opposed to being just numerical. Examples of methods are:
Computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) also known as computer-aided modeling or computer-aided machining is the use of software to control machine tools in the manufacturing of work pieces. This is not the only definition for CAM, but it is the most common. It may also refer to the use of a computer to assist in all operations of a manufacturing plant, including planning, management, transportation and storage. Its primary purpose is to create a faster production process and components and tooling with more precise dimensions and material consistency, which in some cases, uses only the required amount of raw material, while simultaneously reducing energy consumption. CAM is now a system used in schools and lower educational purposes. CAM is a subsequent computer-aided process after computer-aided design (CAD) and sometimes computer-aided engineering (CAE), as the model generated in CAD and verified in CAE can be input into CAM software, which then controls the machine tool. CAM is used in many schools alongside CAD to create objects.
IDEF, initially an abbreviation of ICAM Definition and renamed in 1999 as Integration Definition, is a family of modeling languages in the field of systems and software engineering. They cover a wide range of uses from functional modeling to data, simulation, object-oriented analysis and design, and knowledge acquisition. These definition languages were developed under funding from U.S. Air Force and, although still most commonly used by them and other military and United States Department of Defense (DoD) agencies, are in the public domain.
In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating, and managing software or system requirements.
In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The SDLC concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.
Statistical process control (SPC) or statistical quality control (SQC) is the application of statistical methods to monitor and control the quality of a production process. This helps to ensure that the process operates efficiently, producing more specification-conforming products with less waste scrap. SPC can be applied to any process where the "conforming product" output can be measured. Key tools used in SPC include run charts, control charts, a focus on continuous improvement, and the design of experiments. An example of a process where SPC is applied is manufacturing lines.
In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises.
Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) is a domain of software tools used to design and implement applications. CASE tools are similar to and are partly inspired by computer-aided design (CAD) tools used for designing hardware products. CASE tools are intended to help develop high-quality, defect-free, and maintainable software. CASE software was often associated with methods for the development of information systems together with automated tools that could be used in the software development process.
Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) is a US Air Force program that develops tools, techniques, and processes to support manufacturing integration. It influenced the computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) project efforts of many companies. The ICAM program was founded in 1976 and initiative managed by the US Air Force at Wright-Patterson as a part of their technology modernization efforts. The program initiated the development a series of standards for modeling and analysis in management and business improvement, called Integrated Definitions, short IDEFs.
Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes the ability of equipment to function without failure. Reliability describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period. Reliability is closely related to availability, which is typically described as the ability of a component or system to function at a specified moment or interval of time.
Computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) is the manufacturing approach of using computers to control the entire production process. This integration allows individual processes to exchange information with each part. Manufacturing can be faster and less error-prone by the integration of computers. Typically CIM relies on closed-loop control processes based on real-time input from sensors. It is also known as flexible design and manufacturing.
IDEF0, a compound acronym, is a function modeling methodology for describing manufacturing functions, which offers a functional modeling language for the analysis, development, reengineering and integration of information systems, business processes or software engineering analysis.
Software project management is the process of planning and leading software projects. It is a sub-discipline of project management in which software projects are planned, implemented, monitored and controlled.
Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization.
Virtual engineering (VE) is defined as integrating geometric models and related engineering tools such as analysis, simulation, optimization, and decision making tools, etc., within a computer-generated environment that facilitates multidisciplinary collaborative product development. Virtual engineering shares many characteristics with software engineering, such as the ability to obtain many different results through different implementations.
Reverse engineering is a process or method through which one attempts to understand through deductive reasoning how a previously made device, process, system, or piece of software accomplishes a task with very little insight into exactly how it does so. Depending on the system under consideration and the technologies employed, the knowledge gained during reverse engineering can help with repurposing obsolete objects, doing security analysis, or learning how something works.
In systems engineering, software engineering, and computer science, a function model or functional model is a structured representation of the functions within the modeled system or subject area.
A semantic data model (SDM) is a high-level semantics-based database description and structuring formalism for databases. This database model is designed to capture more of the meaning of an application environment than is possible with contemporary database models. An SDM specification describes a database in terms of the kinds of entities that exist in the application environment, the classifications and groupings of those entities, and the structural interconnections among them. SDM provides a collection of high-level modeling primitives to capture the semantics of an application environment. By accommodating derived information in a database structural specification, SDM allows the same information to be viewed in several ways; this makes it possible to directly accommodate the variety of needs and processing requirements typically present in database applications. The design of the present SDM is based on our experience in using a preliminary version of it. SDM is designed to enhance the effectiveness and usability of database systems. An SDM database description can serve as a formal specification and documentation tool for a database; it can provide a basis for supporting a variety of powerful user interface facilities, it can serve as a conceptual database model in the database design process; and, it can be used as the database model for a new kind of database management system.
A view model or viewpoints framework in systems engineering, software engineering, and enterprise engineering is a framework which defines a coherent set of views to be used in the construction of a system architecture, software architecture, or enterprise architecture. A view is a representation of the whole system from the perspective of a related set of concerns.
Real-time Control System (RCS) is a reference model architecture, suitable for many software-intensive, real-time computing control problem domains. It defines the types of functions needed in a real-time intelligent control system, and how these functions relate to each other.