Engineering Faculty Internship: Direct Engineering in the Automotive Industry

到目前为止，支持并行工程的大多数努力都集中在开发设计全新产品的工具和技术上。许多行业的设计都是革命性的，主要是对现有产品进行增量更改。这类设计是直接工程学的目标，直接工程学关注的是让工程师在设计零件时直接获得关于零件设计和制造的完整知识。直接工程与并行工程的不同之处在于，这些知识不是在设计时生成的，而是从工程数据库中检索的，该数据库完整地记录了现有的设计。该项目专注于开发直接工程的关键使能部件、特定产品的工程设计部件以及汽车曲轴。在一家主要汽车制造商的暑期实习期间，首席调查员将与合作调查员和其他关键人员合作，确定关键的曲轴设计变量及其与功能问题、制造、原型、夹具设计、工装、垫板等的关系。在完全记录曲轴的这些关系后，将开发适当的基于约束的产品表示法。第二阶段的工作将导致产品模型的原型计算机实现，以说明汽车曲轴直接工程的概念。

Most efforts to enable concurrent engineering to date have focused on developing the tools and techniques for designing completely new products. Design in many industries is volutionary, consisting primarily of incremental changes to existing products. This category of design is the target of direct engineering, which is concerned with giving engineers direct access to complete knowledge about the design and manufacture of a part as the part is being designed. Direct engineering differs from concurrent engineering in that this knowledge is not generated at design time, but is retrieved from an engineering database which completely documents existing designs. The project focuses on developing the key enabling component of direct engineering, the engineering design component for a specific product, and an automobile crankshaft. During a summer internship at a major automobile manufacturer, the principal investigator will work with the co-investigator and other key personnel to identify the critical crankshaft design variables and their relationships to functional issues, manufacturing, prototyping, fixture design, tooling, dunnage, etc. After completely documenting these relationships for the crankshaft, an appropriate constraint-based product representation will be developed. The second stage of the work will result in a prototype computer implementation of the product model to illustrate the concept of direct engineering for automotive crankshafts.