Total Lifecycle Management

Assignment 1

Summary of Research Paper:

Based Flexible and Integrated PLM System

at Ford
Authored by:

M.B. Raza; T. Kirkham; R. Harrison; Q. Reul

Submitted by:
Abhimanyu Jamwal - 2K10/AE/02
Abhinav - 2K10/AE/03
Kamal Kumar - 2K10/AE/24
Ram Kripal Singh - 2K10/AE/52
Shakti Mann - 2K10/AE/58

ABSTRACT: This paper reviews the problem of information integration in large scale, complex and knowledge
intensive organisations such as automotive industries. Presently this innovation has focused on the improved process
development between different stages of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). However in terms of implementation
the application data management techniques have lagged behind leaving these processes disjointed and lacking in
automation. Assembly line design and configuration consist of highly creative and complex tasks that involve
extensive communication and information exchange among distributed teams. This paper proposes an improved
model based on innovation in the PLM to quickly adapt to the new feasible assembly line configuration that satisfies
the ever changing user requirements.
Introduction: Agile manufacturing in vehicle assembly operations requires rapid configuration and/or re-configuration
of assembly lines to support high levels of customisation in product design and manufacture. The information of
product design needs to be quickly adapted to machine and line creation. This can be achieved by greater integration
of production and enterprise knowledge into the manufacturing processes. However in complex, large scale
production environments legacy systems and vendor specific technologies exist and persist. These systems slow
down and break up the integration process, making it hard to achieve enterprise level agile processes to support
manufacturing/assembly processes.
The research explores the use of ontologies and recent advances in the semantic web technologies in factory
automation systems over different lifecycle phases of products. This contribution proposes a method by which
knowledge can be better managed in automated production systems.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Although PDM and PLM systems have significantly improved manufacturing efficiencies still significant limitations exist
in terms of integration and right information retrieval tasks. Data created from CAD software has facilitated designers
in the electronic creation, reuse and manipulation of product models. This combination of electronic design data and
localized software management has proven inadequate for demands of increasingly streamlined business processes.
PDM systems need to integrate with other elements of the enterprise including non-engineering areas such as sales,
marketing and supply chain management. Data used in PDM has therefore moved from a focus on product design to
a need to present this data in order to enhance the wider manufacturing processes. Thus PDM can now be seen as a
legacy element of a wider PLM process.
Knowledge Management and Engineering
Ontologies are often viewed as allowing more complete and precise domain models.
Ontologies are developed and used because they enable among others:
to share knowledge
to reuse knowledge
to make assumption about a domain explicit
Within multi-faceted complex production environments the use of ontologies has great potential to aid knowledge
management. It will enable different communities to infer the same meaning when information/ knowledge is
exchanged across systems. Benefits can be realised through the use of ontologies particularly for an assembly line
design / reconfiguration. The rapid development of web services based computing has presented ways of integrating
cross-organisational processes. In order
to aid this integration, the concept of the semantic web has been developed to better aid the integration of varying
forms of distributed data using ontologies. The purpose of re-configuration is to allow a manufacturing system to
change rapidly and cost-effectively from its current to a new configuration without being taken off-line, maintaining
system effectiveness
> Problem Scenario: The PLM system at Ford is a complex aggregation of several domains working collaboratively
to manufacture and assemble different variants of vehicles. PLM at Ford is managed using Teamcenter that links
product data from various CAD /CAM repositories. The machines on the line are designed collaboratively with external
machine builders. The design format between the parties has to be agreed as part of this process and the final design
is incorporated into Teamcenter. The third party companies dont have access to the Teamcenter repository and mostly
rely on email based exchange of design data. By applying a more automated approach using SWSs (semantic web
services), it is envisaged that both time and cost can be reduced.
The Powertrain assembly plant and its relationship with PLM has been the core of the research. A typical Powertrain
assembly process involves hundreds of individual parts and the impact of change in one part may cause a rippling
effect in the whole assembly processes. A key role of PLM system should be to detect and manage this change and its
effect which was found missing.
Case Study: The focus of this paper is rapid reconfiguration of assembly lines in Powertrain assemblage through the
assimilation of PLM data. This has been achieved by integration of services into the PLM tool. To automate this task,
product (engine) and resource (line) link points i.e. dependency relationships need to be defined at early stages of

design and made available to be searched, analysed and implemented on when and where required basis. This level
of integration will link the PLM system improvements to both the machine data integration and also to the enterprise
computing applications at Ford.
Environment: The testing environment is constructed using Festo automation rig components supplied by Ford which
use the same interfaces as the machines on the Powertrain line at Ford plant in Dagenham, UK. Control of the
interfaces was linked to a web service enabled control application developed for the SOCRADES EU Framework 6
project.
Ontology: A general layout of the line is captured as ontology and an instance of it is defined as Festo Rig with the
current layout of the prototype line where each component (independent work unit) has had its CAD data translated
into ontology. This allowed the line components and layouts to be interrogated by SWSs through ontologies. The
translation of product and resource data in Teamcenter (stored in multiple CAD formats) into the OWL format is
achieved via the use of ontology design tool Protg. The ontologies facilitate improvement compared to the previous
method of human based re/configuration of the line.
Service Interaction: In order to demonstrate the use of SWSs and the enhanced use of data in PLM, the rig was
implemented with several supporting services. These supporting services provide the function to both support the line
design process in PLM and also add live analysis of line execution using the data from the orchestrator linked to the
rig.
> Application of Product lifecycle management includes two processes- use of semantic web services for knowledge
capture and it use with the production process.
Live System: It uses PLM services to notify events from the line to shop floor engineers such as if there is a jam on a
conveyor or the current load level of the indexing table exceeds etc. This information can then be used by the PLM
user to aid in the diagnosis of errors in the assembly line. If there are errors the PLM service uses the line ontology to
find a remedy to treat the error. It also notifies appropriate services on the supply chain. A supporting knowledge base
of previous faults linked to probable causes could aid in this process and potentially enhance production output.
Product Reconfiguration: The methodology facilitates Ford Company to visualise, model and re-configure
new/changed assembly line fairly automatically for building new/changed engines. Ontology of a complete zone of
Power-train assembly line with several workstations was captured and tested for changed product scenarios. Key
concepts introduced into the ontology of the line are work piece, work piece characteristics, workstation, workstation
characteristics, assembly operation, OEM, operator and end product.
Evaluation:
An initial version of the PLM service was demonstrated on the Ford rig at EU IST 2009 event in Lyon, France. A user
interface was created to allow the compatibility of new products when applied to the line to be assessed. An error case
was set up on the rig that brought both of the processes together where a fault on the line was detected and an
appropriate response was selected by the PLM service. A key aim of PLM at Ford has been to improve the speed and
reduce costs by improving the efficiency of the line commissioning process. For example this approach will
automatically pick out any issues with the dimensions of the product and the dimensions of certain elements in the
line. These issues can be sent to the product designer and changes can be made before the commissioning process
starts.
Conclusion:
This paper describes how existing PLM systems can be used as a Knowledge Management (KM) tool to solve
the semantic interoperability problem of heterogeneous data.
The main objective is to improve the capabilities of technology intensive organisations to monitor and respond to
technological and product changes.
The development of a series of ontologies to both represent and capture this data will rapidly improve the
production process in large scale manufacturing/assembly processes.
This approach allows services such as in the case of PLM to better understand product and line design allowing
this data to feed automated processes to aid agile manufacturing.
Using knowledge based services a new layer of manufacturing management can be envisaged that will aid the
entire production lifecycle