DEVELOPMENT OF COLLABORATIVE CAD SYSTEM FOR THE CONCEPTUAL EMBODIMENT DESIGN PHASE

• Main Author: Muharram Hasby, Fariz
• Format: Dissertations
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/87037
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

The Industry 4.0 concept which is centered on connectivity between entities is the newest paradigm for the manufacturing sector. Information and communication technologies, along with computational technologies, are a few pillars of the Industry 4.0 concept that enables collaboration between various production functions, located both inside or outside an organization. These developments will encourage firms to participate more in collaborative production activities that have the potential to generate more benefits for the participating organizations. To increase the general efficiency of collaborative production activities, these collaborations need to be done on the whole of the production chain, including in collaborative research and development activities. Appropriate technologies to aid in conducting collaborative production are also needed so that the collaborative activities can be done in a manner that will bring positive impact to the organization’s performance. In keeping specifically with product design and product development, Computer Aided Design (CAD) systems are used as the backbone to help designers in visualizing and documenting product models in development. However, popular CAD systems utilized in the industries are more focused on individual use and mainly deployed for the final design phases, i.e. detail design and engineering analysis of the resulting product design. On the contrary, CAD support for the earlier design phases (functional design, conceptual design, and embodiment design) can be categorized as minimal. Goel et al. (2012) summarized that future CAD systems need to have several distinct characteristics that differentiate themselves from popular CAD systems being used right now. These characteristics are termed the 4C’s as follows: Collaborative, Conceptual, Creative, and Cognitive. Therefore, this research will focus on developing a prototype CAD system that tries to fulfill the mentioned characteristics, especially on the concept of collaborative and conceptual design. These characteristics are deemed to be very important in light of the recent developments and widespread adoption of the Industry 4.0 concepts mentioned before. The development of the CAD system is based on the Coevolution Design Theory, a cognitive design theory that illustrates the mental processes that are realized in a designer’s mind that is currently engaged in the process of designing. The synthesis of the cognitive theory with the distinct sequential phases of design (Pahl and Beitz, 2007; Chen et al., 2021; Ulrich and Eppinger, 2016) shows that to conduct an efficient early design phase, there is a need for a CAD system that can help designers in the simultaneous elaboration between the product functions and the corresponding product forms and structures to realize the aforementioned product functions. The CAD system should also enable designers to move smoothly between those two domains during the design process. These needs will become the basis for the development of features and modules contained in the prototype CAD system that is aimed to assist designers in collaborative early design development. In the collaborative side, there is also a need for a mechanism to select the best design alternative among those put forward by the collaborating designers, so as to prevent deadlocks from happening due to disagreement among the designers. Therefore, this research will also try to put forward a method to choose between design concepts, along with a defined workflow for utilizing the prototype CAD system so that the collaborative design can proceed in a smooth manner. After the conceptual framework for the CAD system has been developed, the framework itself will be validated through a simple design test case. Afterwards, the prototype CAD system will be realized using already existing or specially designed software platforms so that the prototype system can be further tested and evaluated. The evaluation of the CAD system is done through an experiment involving group of respondents that are tasked with solving design problems, where a select group of respondents are asked to use the prototype CAD system, while another group of respondents are asked to solve the same problems without using the prototype CAD system. Further analysis of the design results from the respondents, along with deep interviews paired with retrospective analysis of the design process are conducted to arrive at improvement inputs for the developed CAD system prototype. The evaluation results showed that the prototype CAD system has been able to fulfill its goal in helping designers to conduct collaborative designs, such as in facilitating exchange of design ideas, providing a structured workflow for a collaborative design process, and helping designers to keep track of the collaborative design progress. However, further scrutiny needs to be applied to the CAD system and its workflow, such that they do not become too restrictive for designers when they are conducting collaborative design using the system. In the future, further improvements can still be done to the prototype CAD system, such as by adding mechanisms and algorithms that can help guide designers in completing design tasks that currently reside outside the scope of the developed CAD system, such as in defining the product functions, defining the technical attributes of a certain parts of product, and more of such cases found during the present collaborative design workflow.