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

这项赠款提供资金，调查信息管理基础设施，以支持规划和开发的工程产品和系统的家庭大规模定制。 这项研究将由来自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的多大学团队进行。 该研究将解决三个信息技术的挑战，包括信息管理基础设施，图形建模环境，和基于代理的合成框架，以支持产品族规划和定制。 首先，一个通用的信息管理基础设施将被开发，以促进捕获信息的组件共享和重用的产品系列。 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，以帮助配置平台的概念和定制的产品系列内的变种。 这项研究将与工业和政府合作伙伴合作进行，包括普惠公司、通用汽车公司、学徒系统公司和国家标准与技术研究所。 本研究的结果将扩大利用信息技术在整个工程开发一种新的方法来管理设计信息相关的产品族计划的大规模定制。 这项工作将扩展产品设计存储库的当前表示和互操作性标准。 为产品族规划和信息管理开发的理论基础将提供一个实验原型图形建模环境的发展的基本框架，以测试所提出的表示和基于代理的合成方法的有效性。 这种建模环境也将有助于产品族规划和综合的集成和交互式解决方案程序的开发。 该项目还包括教育部分，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纳入四所大学的六个本科生和六个研究生课程。 还将与参与研究的工业伙伴进行技术转让。

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.