The AVIDM-Based Product Design Process Integration

With the quick development of virtual prototype and other digital design technology, CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering) has been applied into whole product lifecycle. However, designers still spend amount time to transfer design and analytic data between CAE tools because of lacking interfaces between them. Such repetitious manual works have hindered enterprises from improving product development efficiency and product quality. Large numbers of self-developed CAE tools exist in China's defense and military industry enterprises because of the particularity of the industry. So, it is extraordinarily urgent to integrate the CAE tools within military product design process.As an enterprise-level collaborative product design & manufacture system oriented complex products in defense and military industry, it is reasonable and necessary for AVIDM(Aerospace Vehicle Integrated Design & Manufacture) to integrate self-developed CAE tools within military product design process.This paper makes some studies and analysis of correlative software systems and research works at home and abroad. Then, a hierarchical product design process model is presented based on the characteristics of military product development process. The model's first tier is the product development process during the whole product lifecycle which includes phases from schema plan to manufacture and maintenance phases. This tier can be described with a WBS-tree (Work Breakdown Structure) which showes a project manager's view. The second tier of the model is design flow related with one node of the WBS-tree. Even if the WBS-tree is re-constructed, the design flows are still reusable, so, the product development process can be managed in a loose-coupled way. It is proposed to disperse design data into data items and build a design data dictionary so that design data can be shared in a consistent way with product data model.This paper gives a heavy stress on the method of integrating the self-developed specific CAE tools into design flow. CAE tools are encapsulated into Java RMI (Remote Method Invocation) object so that new tools can be added into AVIDM as scalable components in a heterogeneous distributed computation environment. A CAE tools resource model which includes static and dynamic information of CAE tools is also described.A workflow system which meets the WFMC (Workflow Management Coalition) standard is adopted to define design flow and drive, monitor their running. The existing workflow system of AVIDM3.0 is extended to support engineering design activity; engineering design data is distinguished from control data of workflow system.The object model, logical model and storage model of data item are presented so that engineering design data can be managed both in dispersed data items and in files. Based on the models of data item, the development specification for adapters and two adapter dispatch algorithms are introduced.In order to validate the hierarchical product design process model and relevant integrating solutions, a prototype system named AVIDE (AVIDM-Based Integrated Design Environment) is implemented based on AVIDM3.0, upon which several demo design flows and self-developed CAE tools are integrated. The prototype is constructed on J2EE platform.