The Methodology and Environment for Modeling and Implementation in Concurrent Engineering

The Concurrent Design, characterized with the integration of a large scale information and knowledge environment in a Computer Integrated Manufacturing System (CIMS), will involve multidiscipline and multidomain of knowledge. This will lead to the difficulty to implement the concurrent design with the nature of complexity, integrality and systematicity in design process, which caused by the above mentioned knowledge integration. This paper, based on the fundamental theory of design processes and adopted the knowledge processing theory and techniques offered by Intelligence Engineering, has investigated: the descriptive models which represent the general framework of concurrent design processes; the cognitive models that highlights the reasoning aspect performed by group of human experts from multidisciplines in concurrent design process; the prescriptive model which is prepared for being used in an computerized automated concurrent design system; the computable model represented with the object-oriented method, which can be executed in the computer world for automated concurrent design. Also this paper developed an engineering environment of analyzing, modeling and implementing with an architecture of Integrated Intelligent Unit, borrowed from the theory of Intelligence Engineering. In a separate paper, the authors apply the above methodology to a concrete concurrent design on a mechanical system to show the feasibility and advantages of the proposed method.