This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project proposes a framework to support product development, analysis, and decision making in multi-domain engineering environments through domain-unified product models. Ad hoc and even formal (standards-based) product data models, subject to the need for multiple views and attributes to support domain-specific application requirements, suffer from data redundancy and consistency problems. These problems are exacerbated by the implicit nature of information in geometric representation schemes and the difficulty and latency of its access. The intellectual merit of the work lies in the ability of the developed formalism to support the simultaneous generation and maintenance of multiple views of product model data, and the enforcement of consistency between them. A framework is proposed to manage the complexity of model synchronization and view-generation with the domain-unified modeling environment through the active management of constraints and goals for model population and transformation. The framework is to be validated within the context of an environment for the creation, management, and distribution of domain-unified models of packaged electronic components.
The broader impact of this work accrues from the application of the domain-unified modeling methodology to packaged components for printed electronic assemblies (PCAs). The design of electronic products is realized through a combination of electronic design automation (EDA) software tools and computer-aided design (CAD) tools that support a wide variety of inter-related design and analysis disciplines spanning the electronic and mechanical domains (e.g. functional, layout, thermal, manufacturability). These tools are critically dependent on the availability of accurate computer-interpretable models of packaged electronic components. Due to the absence of accepted modeling standards, a lack of effective tools for the creation, maintenance, and distribution of component data, and a lack of interoperability across EDA and CAD tools. The proposed domain-unified modeling tools and data services will enable OEMs to more efficiently mange and distribute component information within their enterprises, OEMs and designers to leverage collective efforts in component modeling, and provide efficient mechanisms for the communication of data between component suppliers and OEMs.
The design of complex products and systems involves a wide range of engineering disciplines with inter-related requirements, constraints, and objectives. With ever increasing pressure to reduce the product development cycle time and bring innovations to market more quickly, a concurrent approach to product development is often employed. Throughout the design process, product data must be shared between different disciplines using disparate tools for computer-aided design, analysis, and manufacture (CAD / CAE / CAM). The design of electronic and electro-mechanical products is highly dependent on the availability of accurate CAD models of the components to be used in design. It is estimated that approximately 10% of the total design effort is spent managing component data to support the requirements of the electronic and mechanical CAD tools and engineering analysis. In addition to the duplication of effort in the independent disciplines, there are often challenges maintaining the consistency and accuracy of these multiple representations of component data. This project was focused on the development of software data models, tools, techniques, and algorithms for creating and maintaining multi-domain libraries of electronic component data. The resulting tools and techniques promise to significantly reduce the expense $6B annual expense of creating and maintaining component data models. The resulting innovations include a series of software algorithms for assimilating and synchronizing data from electronic and mechanical design representations, as well as a unique approach to the representation of electro-mechanical component data models. A software product and associated service for managing multi-domain component data models has been developed based on these underlying techniques, algorithms, and data models. This technology, commercially known as PackageWright, offers unique capabilities for the creation and maintenance of multi-domain libraries of electro-mechanical components. Successful adoption and deployment of this technology will significantly reduce the costs of creating and maintaining component data while simultaneously increasing the accuracy and fidelity of the resulting component data models. The technology also promises to reduce costly design iterations resulting from inconsistencies in component data between the electrical and mechanical domains. In addition to the core technical innovations and potential commercial impact, this project also provided research experiences for five undergraduate engineering students through summer internships. The summer interns were involved with a variety of facets of an industrial research and development project. Interns participated directly in both engineering design activities, as well as the software development lifecycle.
