Enhancing product development through a dynamic information interchange approach

Abstract

In today's increasingly competitive environment, firms are experiencing growing pressure to reduce the product development lead time to meet market expectations. In this paper, a Responsive Product Development System (RPDS), which is used to model the product development process and the components of the process with object technology, introduces a dynamic product information schema characterized by its ability to provide design practitioners with a product data exchange standard, thus transforming data to information and then knowledge. To validate the feasibility of the proposed schema, a case study has been conducted in a plastic product factory based on the suggested approach. Following feedback from these companies, a further review of the design of the proposed system has been conducted to ensure efficient information flow across the heterogeneous computing environment. A measure of loss to society associated with RPDS in product development time is also included as a system evaluation.

Keywords:

• Product development
• Extensible markup language
• Case-based reasoning
• Product data exchange
• Object-oriented modelling

Acknowledgement

The work described in this paper was substantially/partially supported by a grant from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project No. G-YX53).