Product data quality validation system for product development processes in high-tech industry

Abstract

Among various product data, 3D CAD data plays a key role in current product design and manufacturing processes including industrial design, detail design, CAE, inspection, mould-making, production, and so on. If 3D CAD data has geometrical or topological errors by user mistakes or modelling software bugs and those errors are not cleaned by the data creator in an early stage, the data will be transferred to the downstream operators and they have to fix the errors before starting their own work. Because 3D data is quite complex, it is very difficult to recognise the data errors manually in a modelling system before a big problem is encountered which blocks the next operation. In this case, it generally causes time delay and high cost for data correction and the effect will be bigger when the process is close to the back-end. In this research, we develop a fully automated product data quality validation and management system to support the product development processes of high-tech products like televisions, camcorders, mobile telephones, home appliances, etc. The system automatically validates the 3D data in real time and gives 3D error reports to the creator to correct modelling failures in their steps. Also, project managers can check or control the data delivery based on the data quality for each step.

Keywords:

• PDQ (product data quality)
• automated validation
• interoperability
• quality stamp

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express special thanks to Mr. Doug Cheney of ITI for his positive and continuous support.