ITR: Collaborative Research - An Information Management Infrastructure for Product Family Planning and Mass Customization

这笔赠款提供资金，用于调查信息管理基础设施，以支持大规模定制工程产品和系统系列的规划和开发。这项研究将由一个由多所大学组成的团队进行，该团队由宾夕法尼亚州立大学、巴克内尔大学、密苏里大学罗拉分校和马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校的教师组成。这项研究将解决三个信息技术挑战，包括信息管理基础设施、图形化建模环境和基于代理的综合框架，以支持产品族规划和定制。首先，将开发一个通用的信息管理基础设施，以促进捕获有关产品系列中的组件共享和重用的信息。接下来，将创建一个图形化建模环境，以促进产品族规划和构建、需求规范和客户偏好捕获。最后，将开发一个基于代理的合成框架，以帮助配置产品系列中的平台概念和定制变体。这项研究将与行业和政府合作伙伴合作进行，这些合作伙伴包括普惠、通用汽车、学徒系统和美国国家标准与技术研究所。这项研究的结果将通过开发一种新的方法来管理与大规模定制的产品族规划相关的设计信息，从而扩大信息技术在工程中的应用。这项工作将扩展现有的产品设计库的表示和互操作性标准。为产品族规划和信息管理提供的理论基础将为开发实验原型图形建模环境提供基本框架，以测试所提出的表示和基于代理的综合方法的有效性。这一建模环境还将有助于为产品族规划和综合开发综合和交互的解决方案程序。该项目也有教育的成分。这笔赠款将促进参与这项研究的四所大学之间的本科生和研究生交流，基于拟议研究的项目将整合到四所大学的六个本科生和六个研究生课程中。还将与参与研究的行业合作伙伴进行技术转让。

This grant provides funding to investigate an information management infrastructure to support the planning and development of families of engineered products and systems for mass customization. The research will be conducted by a multi-university team comprised of faculty from the Pennsylvania State University, Bucknell University, the University of Missouri-Rolla, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The research will address three information technology challenges that include an information management infrastructure, a graphical modeling environment, and an agent-based synthesis framework to support product family planning and customization. First, a generalized information management infrastructure will be developed to facilitate capturing information regarding component sharing and reuse within a family of products. Next, a graphical modeling environment will be created to facilitate product family planning and construction, requirements specification, and customer preference capture. Finally, an agent-based synthesis framework will be developed to help configure platform concepts and customized variants within a product family. The research will be conducted in collaboration with industrial and government partners that include Pratt & Whitney, General Motors, Apprentice Systems, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The results of this research will expand the utilization of information technology across engineering by developing a novel approach for managing design information related to product family planning for mass customization. The work will extend current representation and interoperability standards for product design repositories. The theoretical foundations developed for product family planning and information management will provide the basic framework for the development of an experimental prototype graphical modeling environment to test the validity of the proposed representation and agent-based synthesis methods. This modeling environment will also contribute to the development of integrated and interactive solution procedures for product family planning and synthesis. The project also has an educational component to it. The grant will foster undergraduate and graduate student exchanges between the four universities that are involved in this research, and projects based on the proposed research will be integrated within six undergraduate and six graduate courses at the four universities. Technology transfer will also occur with the industrial partners involved in the research.