Improving the product development process through integrated revision control and twinning of digital-physical models during prototyping

产品开发过程需要对不同质量的物理和数字模型进行编排，并采用不同的顺序。这些模型的选择取决于：设计团队的技能;可用的资源和工具;模型的目的;以及设计任务的性质。在所有工程学科中，数字和物理模型的组合对于支持设计过程的进展是必要的，每个模型及其迭代都会产生新的理解和知识，为决策提供信息。虽然广泛的建模-物理和数字-对于开发正确的第一次产品至关重要，但同时使用数字和物理模型会产生两个相互关联的问题。这些是：缺乏对物理原型的修订控制;以及需要设计师手动检查、测量和解释对数字或物理模型的修改，以便随后更新另一个。物理模型的这种手动修订控制过程以及本文中所称的“数字物理模型的配对”对设计和开发过程的成本、质量和时间产生影响。特别是，缺乏修订控制会导致多个几乎相同的模型实例，这会导致过程管理、可追溯性、决策、设计重复和效率低下以及设计原理捕获等问题。这也使得产品开发过程在数字物理工具链方面的优化几乎是不可能的。在这个项目中，我们将从根本上重新定义数字和物理模型的修订控制和配对过程，从手动，繁琐，容易出错和昂贵的过程到无缝集成（数字到物理和物理到数字），快速，可靠和知识丰富的过程。

An orchestration of physical and digital models of varying fidelities, and in differing sequences, is required for the product development process. The choice of these models depends upon the: skills of the design team; resources and tools available; purpose of the model; and nature of the design task. In all engineering disciplines a combination of digital and physical models is necessary to support the progression of the design process, with each model and iteration thereof generating new understanding and knowledge to inform decision-making. While extensive modelling - both physical and digital - is imperative to develop right-first-time products, the parallel use of digital and physical models gives rise to two interrelated issues. These are: the lack of revision control for physical prototypes; and the need for designers to manually inspect, measure, and interpret modifications to either digital or physical models, for subsequent update of the other. This manual process of revision control for physical models and what is referred to herein as 'twinning of digital-physical models' impacts on the cost, quality and time of the design and development process. In particular, the lack of revision control leads to multiple near-identical model instances, which contribute to issues of process management, traceability, decision-making, design duplication and inefficiency, and design rationale capture. It also makes optimisation of the product development process in terms of the digital-physical tool-chain all but impossible. In this project we will fundamentally redefine the revision control and twinning processes for digital and physical models from a manual, cumbersome, error-prone and expensive procedure to one that is seamlessly integrated (digital-to-physical and physical-to-digital), rapid, reliable and knowledge rich.