The long-term goal of this project is to develop the functional framework that supports concurrent engineering in design and manufacturing. The purpose is to shorten the design cycle time, to increase productivity and, more importantly, to come up with optimum or near-optimum design and production plans. In order to accomplish this goal, two specific objectives are identified. The first one is to characterize the various mechanical functions for creating the functional structure of a product. The functional structure will facilitate the integration of the functional requirements into various activities of the product cycle so as to serve as the links among design, process planning, manufacturing, assembly, and inspection. The second objective is to develop a functional tolerancing framework based on the characteristics of the required functions. Using the tolerancing scheme, the current practice of tolerance representation can be extended and applied to the products that are sophisticated in function and/or complicated in geometry. The research will result in a systematic approach for the characterization and representation of the functional requirements in mechanical design. It will provide a basis for integrating design intent into the product cycle so that higher level of decision making and complex reasoning for the determination of optimum product design and process planning become possible.
