Journal of Materials Processing Technology 123 (2002) 85±92

An innovative scheme for product and process design

Henry C.W. Laua,*, Bing Jianga, Felix T.S. Chanb, Ralph W.L. Ipc
a
Department of Manufacturing Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Hong Kong
b
Department of Industrial and Manufacturing System Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
c
Department of Manufacturing Engineering and Engineering Management, The City University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Received 20 May 2001

Abstract

In today's faster-paced markets, the focus has shifted to innovation, ¯exibility and swiftness in terms of product design, process planning,
logistics planning and associated supply chain operations. To this end, an innovated scheme for integrated product and process design
(ISIPPD) is proposed in this paper with the description of the proposed scheme from the stage of product visualization to process design, with
a view to directly generating an optimized process plan based on the product raw data. In this scheme, a neutral data ®le representing product
features is used as the data source for generating the product feature code. Based on such feature coding representation, a detailed process plan
can be generated through a process optimization module that incorporates an object-based knowledge system for achieving enhancement in
terms of resource allocation. The signi®cance of this research can be shown when various versions of product design with the associated
process plans are available for analysis, and benchmarking via an object-based knowledge system, thereby facilitating an integrated product
and process design approach. # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Computer-aided process planning; Group technology; Neutral ®le; Generic integration; Object-based knowledge systems

1. Introduction computer-aided process planning (CAPP), to perform design

The last decade has seen signi®cant changes made in
terms of the manufacturing paradigm shift from traditional
manufacturing to a world of agile manufacturing, which is
able to respond quickly to customers' demands. Moreover,
the characteristics of the modern manufacturingÐsmall
volume, large varietyÐincrease the complexity of product
and process design. Product and process design are con-
cerned with the preparation of detailed work instructions to
produce parts and are considered to be the most important
interface to both engineering and manufacturing. However,
product and process design are normally the activities which
require a signi®cant amount of time and experience.
The product and process design have some particularly
demanding characteristics: (i) ef®cient communications
between product and process design are dif®cult to achieve;
(ii) many similar parts and processes must be scheduled and
coordinated; (iii) all this complexity must be dealt with in
real time with minimal errors.
In order to solve the above problems, the integration of
product and process design requires the use of computer
systems, such as computer-aided design (CAD) and
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: ‡852-2766-6628; fax: ‡852-2362-5267.
E-mail address: mfhenry@inet.polyu.edu.hk (H.C.W. Lau).
and schedule tasks. This leads to the emergence of different
computer and information technologies, such as the FMS
(¯exible manufacturing system) and CIM (computer inte-
grated manufacturing). Object technology is an information
technique and is used in manufacturing systems. The object
technology concept (or object concept) is not a latest-break-
through technology, but because of its nature and the power
of the concept, its in¯uence emerges ever more strongly. The
following gives a brief description of the concepts central to
object technology:
(i) An object model consists of a set of class and a set of
relationships.
(ii) An object has an internal state that is aware of its own
class.
(iii) A class is a template for objects and in particular, a class
defines what the associated objects can be used for. The
class also describes the operations that the object can
offer, the various activities that belong to each operation
and the different attributes that each object has.
(iv) A class can inherit another class. It can also inherit
several other classes, which is called multiple
inheritance. Inheriting another class means re-using
the definition of that class, in terms of operations,
relationships and attributes.

0924-0136/02/$ ± see front matter # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 9 2 4 - 0 1 3 6 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 6 8 - 7
86 H.C.W. Lau et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 123 (2002) 85±92
(v) An object can be used by other objects. When one
object uses another, it can be considered that it sends
a message to the other objects. The receiving object
accepts the message and performs the required opera-
tion. Performing an operation means that the object
inspects its values, alter its own internal state or uses
other objects.
The object modeling technique is applied in the product
and process design area, which is described in this paper.
Such a model also possesses the characteristics of the
object model such as objects, classes and inheritance.
It is these object-characterized features that enable the
inclusion of important functionalities such as resilience to
change due to the object recon®gurability feature of object
components.
Inside the manufacturing sector, a manufacturing process
usually comprises the CAD and the CAPP area. The major
task of the CAD area is the generation of technical drawings
for part manufacturing. The drawings are subsequently sent
to the CAPP area, speci®cally to the two sub-areas, bill of
material (BOM) generation and process planning. Primarily,
the BOM is a list of the required materials that are going to
be processed and the CAPP system is a process planning and
scheduling system with the aim to allocate resources wisely.
Next, the numerical control (NC) programming department
is called to deliver NC programs for those operations of the
process plans that are associated with NC machines. Finally,
the NC programs are sent to the resource management
department where the availability of reference NC mechan-
ism tools and ®xtures is checked.
In this paper, an innovated scheme for integrated product
and process design (ISIPPD) is proposed, featuring the
incorporation of integrated product and process design
modules that are able to provide a better view of the required
human, equipment and relevant resources at the early stage
of product design. Thus, product and process design mod-
ules are incorporated into the scheme to facilitate the
optimization process when facing the need to allocate
limited resources for product development.
2. Literature review
The literature and current practice indicate that there have
been signi®cant changes made in terms of the manufacturing
paradigm shift from traditional manufacturing to a world of
agile manufacturing, which is able to respond quickly to
customers' demands [1,2]. In general, a long product design
cycle diminishes the competitiveness of products due to the
relatively shortened product lifecycles in the global market-
place. This problem is a subject of investigation in many
research institutions, leading to a ¯ood of publications in
concurrent engineering [3±7], integrated product and pro-
cess design methodologies [8±13] and computer-aided
simulation tools [14,15].
Typically, product designs are conducted in a design
environment where the data generated is either stored as
information in a design drawing or in a large database
together with a variety of other company data. The process
data and models often exist in the expert's mind, not
captured in electronic form. Current process models use
historical and measured data in the actual manufacturing
line. The data measured in the production line is often prone
to errors due to inaccurate measurements, operator errors
and inadequate tools. The measuring process itself slows the
manufacturing process and results in an arti®cially longer
runtime. In an integrated manufacturing system environ-
ment, the product data in legacy databases needs to be
integrated with the more accurate process data and models
that should be acquired from process design experts.
The manufacturing design environment is currently trea-
ted as two isolated design environments; the product design
and the process design. A given process may be forced to
change the design if it is not manufacturable. The design
issues related to the manufacturing of a product span over
multiple disciplines and ®elds of engineering and computer
science [16,17]. The future of manufacturing, which plays a
vital role in the global market, will depend upon how well
people understand manufacturing design issues and how
ef®ciently they integrate the heterogeneous complex systems
conducive to a digital manufacturing environment [18,19].
In order to achieve such objective, many studies in terms
of system development have been proposed. One of the
examples is the CODER system designed by Henderson and
Musti [20], which aims to analyze the solid model of a part
and generate a product feature code based on the DCLASS
coding system automatically. Kishinami et al. [21] intro-
duced another approach for the integration of manufacturing
design environments based on a geometric model named the
cell constructed geometric model (CCM) and a neutral meta-
interface called machining kernel software (MKS). Exam-
ples of these two proposed systems are described in great
detail in the related articles and are not described further
here. However, there remains a major interest regarding the
extraction of data from design databases due to the existence
of dissimilar data management solutions and formats. With
the lack of a generic integration methodology, the need of
software customization according to customer's preferences
seems unavoidable. To address the issue of product data
utilization in various manufacturing activities, an ISIPPD
is proposed in this paper, incorporating various emerging
technologies and approaches such as object technology,
group technology (GT) and programming techniques, with
a view to directly generating an optimized process plan
based on the product raw data.
3. The methodology for the development of ISIPPD
Generating manufacturing processes and their schedule is
typically a complex matter. Because of the fast-changing
 H.C.W. Lau et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 123 (2002) 85±92
Fig. 1. The methodology for the development of the proposed ISIPPD system.
nature of the manufacturing industry, using a common
design and process planning model to capture the essence
of a product is fairly dif®cult to achieve. The ISIPPD is
aimed for a more ¯exible design approach where design data
are classi®ed in a neutral format. The approach in the
ISIPPD development makes use of a neutral ®le to connect
dissimilar product and process design packages through a
¯exible coding arrangement that is designed to cover all the
form features of a product component. The methodology for
the development of ISIPPD is illustrated in Fig. 1. This is an
attempt to introduce the object technology and provide the
integration issues relevant to the object model.
The bene®ts of ISIPPD include: (i) an increase of the
feasibility of product modi®cation; (ii) an increased measure
of the product diversity; (iii) a reduction of the product
development life cycle; (iv) a simpli®cation of the proce-
dures for easier product diagnosis. In particular, the product
design system is characterized by fast-responsiveness to
customer demands. In addition, ¯exibility in the designing
process can be realized with the help of a proactive and
interactive environment, taking advantage of the interoper-
ability of various modules, such as a data conversion mod-
ule, a feature recognizing module and a process optimization
model, all of which are encompassed within the scheme (see
Fig. 1). It should be noted that the ISIPPD proposed in this
article is the extension and further study of a generic CAD to
CAPP integrated system published in a previous article [22].
ISIPPD is equipped with an object-based knowledge
system, which has greatly enhanced the recon®gurability
and customizability of the system due to object technology's
inherent features. In addition, Visual C‡‡ is used instead of
Visual Basic to allow for faster execution and more portable
feature of the program source code. In general, the other
modules have also been modi®ed to provide a more reliable
87
and robust system to be used in an industrial setting. The
methodology for the development of ISIPPD is covered in
the following sections.
3.1. The conversion of product data
No matter what the process plan is, each process planning
system should consider the product, the required resources
and the process involved in one particular plan during the
planning stage of a project. Apparently, the product is the
heart of any project. It initiates any process plan, therefore it
is of prime importance in understanding the process plan.
Without understanding what is needed to be done or what the
speci®cation of the product is, the process plan will develop
without any direction. Next, a system has to identify the
current resource so as to assign the tasks to the appropriate
resource for further operations. If the system does not have
the proper resource to perform the task, then the work
might be ®nished unsatisfactorily or need to be reworked
by another resource. This prolongs the development time
considerably. Thirdly, it would be bene®cial for the system
to understand the plan development process so that it
could estimate the risk and the likelihood of a bottleneck
that would incur during the process plan development
cycle.
In order to ensure that the product data can be recognized
by other computer systems with ease, it is essential that such
data is converted into a neutral format which is supported by
all the other systems, which may have dissimilar standards
of their own. A neutral ®le can be de®ned as a ®le with a
format which is independent of any speci®c system stan-
dards, and which acts as an `agent' to connect dissimilar
computer systems that cannot normally communicate with
each other due to format incompatibility. It should be noted
88 H.C.W. Lau et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 123 (2002) 85±92
that the neutral format is the `acceptable' and `consistent'
format within an organization or a group of organizations
and that the format may differ from other organizations
which may set their own format standards.
In this research, STEP AP203 is suggested to be the
standard for the neutral ®le since it is a universally accepted
standard with conversion programs available for many
proprietary data management solutions. Furthermore, STEP
AP203 is designed for mechanical assembly components
and is appropriate to be used for mechanical design com-
ponents for the manufacturing industry. This neutral ®le
conversion is the ®rst phase of the whole integration process.
The selection of the neutral format is of utmost importance
as it determines whether or not the overall objective can be
achieved.
3.2. The recognition of product features
The recognition of product features consists of a set of
features from a database of features for part recognition. The
main advantage of this process is that since the features are
essential for use in other downstream applications such as
process planning and assembly planning, it makes sense to
specify them through the recognition process.
With the product data in a neutral format, the second
phase is to extract the product features of the design based on
the data of this neutral ®le. In this research, a product feature
is de®ned as a geometric entity or set of entities, which either
directly or indirectly determine a code-related digit. The
product feature recognition process requires a particular
software program in order to scan through the product data
®le, and therefore special techniques are employed to iden-
tify the product features.
3.3. The coding of product feature
A product feature coding arrangement process has been
developed particularly for process planning purpose [26].
The main characteristic of this process is that unlike other
coding arrangement processes which have a rigid digit
length structure, it has a ¯exible digit length capability
which makes it possible to include all the details of product
features in the codes. A specially written program is required
to generate the coding of product features based on the
information gathered from the previous feature recognition
phase.
The coding of product feature serves as a device for
describing a component that is to be produced and carries
the part's design information. Thus, process sequences and
cutting tools that are capable of producing the part can be
determined through the analysis of the part's code. The code
created describes the required part geometry, part material,
major dimensions, tolerance requirements of the part and
surface quality requirements. The information is arranged in
a structured sequence so as to facilitate computer analysis of
the part code for process planning.
3.4. The generation of process plan
The ®nal phase is the generation of process plans for the
manufacture of the products involved. This can be achieved
through a program which is able to interpret the collected
product feature coding and generate an optimized process
plan for the production of the product accordingly. An object-
based knowledge system may be advisable for this task.
The process plan goes through orderly steps sequentially.
During the process planning stage, the state of the object
would advance from one to another in accordance with the
action applied that induces the change of the attributes of a
class. Then, each step is allocated a time period for completing
the task. Later a process list would be generated from the
object, which would also generate the sequence of the process.
4. The system modules of ISIPPD
A generic integrated system from product data to CAPP
named ISIPPD has been implemented based on the meth-
odology as described above. There are four main modules
of ISIPPD, i.e. a product data converter (PDC), a product
feature recognizer (PFR), a feature coding generator (FCG)
and a process plan generator (PPG). These four system
modules of ISIPPD are described in the following sections.
4.1. PDC
No matter what the project is, each process planning
system (or decision-making system) should consider the
product, the required resources and the process involved
in one particular plan during the design and planning stage of
a project. Basically, a planning system requires information
about current resources so as to assign the task to the
appropriate resource to ®nish it properly. The ongoing effort
to develop PDC for product data exchange focuses on the
implementation of the STEP part feature information model
as a conceptual schema for an object-oriented database.
Some of the other work in this area includes descriptions
and interfaces between process planning systems and CAD
systems. The objective of this work is to develop a standard-
oriented part feature extraction system which converts
design data into relevant manufacturing data. The system
uses the STEP de®nition of the part as input to the converting
process. The effort is to keep the feature converting system
as general as possible so that the data input can be from any
STEP schema. The converted features will be saved in the
STEP format so that this can be further interfaced with
CAPP and CAM systems. The STEP ®le not only contains
feature information but also consists of all the geometry
information already existing in the input ®le and can thus be
visualized directly using a STEP supporting CAD system.
The role of PDC is to convert the incoming product data
into the STEP AP203 format. This module is generic in the
sense that it is able to perform format conversion regardless
 H.C.W. Lau et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 123 (2002) 85±92
of the data format of the incoming product data ®les. This is
possible due to the fact that proprietary AP203 translators
for various data management solutions including CATIA,
SolidWorks, Pro/ENGINEER and AutoCAD are incorpo-
rated into this module. Other data management software
packages not included in this list are required to have their
product data converted to any of the formats in compliance
with the major data management systems. To run this
module, the user needs to specify the format of the incoming
®le, the appropriate translator then being selected to start the
conversion process.
4.2. PFR
This module is a specially written software program for
scanning the STEP AP203 ®le with the objective to identify
the product features that are interpreted as STEP-compliant
codes. In order to illustrate the hierarchy of a STEP ®le, a
cylindrical component has been selected as an example,
which is a closed shell and consists of four advanced faces.
The hierarchy tree of the cylindrical component is presented
in Fig. 2.
The mechanism of the program involves the tracing of a
STEP ®le, but such tracing process is not just read in a
sequence starting from line 1 to the end of the ®le. In an
actual case, after the reading of line 1, the scanning process
may be required to jump to line 138, then to line 88 and so
on. As illustrate in the above, the most upper level of a STEP
®le is the `CLOSED_SHELL', hence the scanning process
starts with this keyword search. The following is an extract
from the STEP ®le of the cylindrical component:
#108 ˆ CLOSED SHELL…`NONE'…#25; #31; #81;
#100; #150; #167; #190; #201; #238††;
#169 ˆ CIRCLE…`NONE'; #149; 0:01257845348†:
Fig. 2. Hierarchy tree of the cylindrical component (gray shaded area).
89
The program logic that has been designed to trace along the
whole STEP ®le is depicted in Fig. 3, and Visual C‡‡
[23,24] has been employed as the main programming tool
for developing this module to perform the required task. It is
known that the STEP ®le contains most of the features of the
component such as slot, groove, with the indication of the
exact locations also. In this respect, it is essential that the
format structure of the STEP ®le is fully understood, and
then the Visual C‡‡ program is written to track down the
features and exact dimensions using an algorithm as illu-
strated in Fig. 3. First, the `CLOSED_SHELL' line needs to
be identi®ed and then the program searches for the `array'
which normally speci®es a certain feature of the component.
Further analysis will determine the exact type of feature with
detailed dimensions.
4.3. FCG
This module focuses on receiving the input from the PFR
and outputting the (product) feature codes based on a new
coding arrangement process. Part of the new coding system
uses elements of existing coding schemes. Here the objec-
tive is to code a part with enough information so that the
code can be the input data to a CAPP system for sequencing
operations and selecting cutting tools.
Because the new coding scheme considers both the over-
all shape and the individual machined shape, a hybrid of the
hierarchical and the chain type structure is used. The new
GT coding scheme uses Arabic numbers to present the part's
design and manufacturing information. A number's value
and its position in the code provide certain information. For
example, the value of the ®rst number in the proposed code
stands for the overall shape of the part.
The new GT coding scheme has a three hierarchical level
architecture to identify, de®ne, classify and represent the part.
90 H.C.W. Lau et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 123 (2002) 85±92

Fig. 3. The program logic for tracing along the whole STEP file.

These three levels are the overall description (level 1), the
machined shapes description (level 2) and the machined
shape's attributes description (level 3). The details of the
new coding arrangement process have been presented in a
previous paper [26] and are not elaborated upon here.
4.4. Optimized PPG
The PPG is used to describe the product and work order
number, the planning date, the process list and the assigned
resources to perform the task. This module is designed
based on a knowledge of workshop practice and reference
materials. In this respect, object technology is employed to
build an object model to encapsulate the relevant knowledge
of the manufacturing operations. (It is assumed that a
company's resources, such as human resources and equip-
ment resources, are being regarded as a number of abstracted
`interactive' data entities.) Fig. 4 shows an extract of the
object model from the PPG module. Such an object module
possesses the basic features including encapsulation, inheri-
tance and polymorphism [25]. Encapsulation, which can be
referred to as the principle of information hiding, allows task
and data to be packaged together. Inheritance allows people
to specify the common attributes and operations of a parti-
cular class once, and then this class can be re-used to generate
other classes provided that they have common attributes and
operations. Polymorphism demonstrates the ability to send
the same message to many different objects and enables
objects to respond in their own speci®c manner. Those
object-oriented features, which have been incorporated into
the proposed scheme, enable the inclusion of some important
functionalities such as resilience to change due to the object
recon®gurability ability (by altering the attributes of objects),
the re-usability of object components (residing in an object
repository) and better maintenance of data (encapsulated as
part of the object) which are part of the objects.

Fig. 4. An extract of the object model from the PPG module.

 H.C.W. Lau et al. / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 123 (2002) 85±92
There are basically 11 object classes in the PPG object
module. As shown in Fig. 4, the 11 object classes are project
class, product class, report class, work order class, process
schedule class, process class, scheduling heuristics class,
process knowledge class, evaluation class, team class and
staff class. The attributes embraced in the classes are the
nature of the object, the estimated process and time collected
from an experienced process planner and the assessment of
the number and the type of staff involved in the planned
project. A variety of speci®cations including mechanical,
industrial and graphics are stated in the attribute section. The
report class is used to record and document any action and
decision made during the project development process and
provides a good way to trace the cause of any action in a
subsequent process.
The outstanding feature of the PPG object module is its
ability to plan the product development process during the
early stage of product development, rather than during deploy-
ment time in manufacturing areas. The signi®cant advantage
is that the process planners are able to draft the most suitable
plan in a very short time, attributing to the feature of recon-
®gurability of the PPG module. In addition, with the `poly-
morphism' feature, the PPG module is capable of suggesting
the necessary actions to be taken by various relevant sections
(objects), in the case that there is an unexpected request
(message). For instance, there is a request for the order
delivery time to be shortened by 10 days, and in order to
cope with this `ad hoc' request, the system is going to suggest
the appropriate business plans and an alternate schedule.
5. General discussion
In general, the techniques described in the previous
sections are used to model the recon®gurable repository in
the ISIPPD system systematically. The system modules are
applied to the product data conversion, feature recognition,
feature coding and process planning, all of which have been
discussed to show how to construct the dynamic system.
As shown in Fig. 2, a cylindrical component is designed
with the CAD program of Pro/Engineering. It has a closed
shell and four advanced faces. After the conversion by PDC,
a STEP AP203 format ®le of the cylindrical component is
formed. The STEP ®le is a text ®le and the component's
design features such as face outer bound and plane are
extracted by the PFR. The objective of FCG is to accept
the component's design information (component code value
of each digit) and store the code in the knowledge system for
PPG to generate the process plan. The FCG automatically
provides the values list of each digit step-by-step, choosing
one of the values according to the component design
description or engineering drawings and deciding each digit
value of the code. Then, the FCG automatically generates a
component code based on a GT coding scheme. The details
of the coding scheme have been presented in a previous
paper [26] and are not discussed further here.
91
In Fig. 4, the whole PPG can be clearly seen and each of its
classes is used to describe the process planning. PPG decides
the production operations based on the digit values of the
code. The best choice of machine, cutting tool and cutting
conditions is selected for each operation. The best sequence
of operations is also decided depending on the minimum
component set-ups and the minimum tool changes. Finally,
PPG produces a detailed process plan for the component.
6. Conclusions
To compete in today's business environment, companies
are required to integrate business activities into a global
response strategy. To cope with sudden changes, companies
need to conduct their business activities in a ¯exible manner.
At present, systems that have implemented object technol-
ogy have become more comprehensive, understandable,
recon®gurable, adaptable and re-usable. As a universal
technique, the object concept is spreading into more and
more areas of technology and being used in more and more
application areas. Object orientation is expected to be the
technique that will be used for virtually every type of
software system. It is also likely to become the dominant
technique for the development of integrated manufacturing.
Based on such technology, the design and development of
the ISIPPD for the integration of product and process design
are described in this paper.
In conclusion, the proposed scheme incorporates various
emerging techniques and is designed to respond to the
ever-changing requirements in the marketplace in terms
of product varieties and features, thereby contributing to
the research domain related to the enhancement of respon-
siveness and ¯exibility related to the integration of product
and process design.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Research Committee and
the Department of Manufacturing Engineering of The Hong
Kong Polytechnic University for the support of this research
project.
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