Data processing: generic control systems or specific application – Specific application – apparatus or process – Product assembly or manufacturing
Reexamination Certificate
1999-09-08
2003-10-14
Picard, Leo (Department: 2125)
Data processing: generic control systems or specific application
Specific application, apparatus or process
Product assembly or manufacturing
C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06633788
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a data processing method and a computer based data processing system for use in providing a procedure for generating a product. The method and system are useful tools in the development and/or optimisation of procedures in particular, although not necessarily exclusively, design, development and manufacturing procedures for bringing a product to a market.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
For a business enterprise to compete successfully it needs not only to provide the product the marketplace demands, but also to optimise the procedures by which that product is brought to the market. These procedures, for example design, development and manufacturing procedures, can be represented as a series of activities carried out on or in relation to the product and/or its constituent components and the sequence in which those activities are arranged, where the output from one activity provides an input to one or more subsequent activities.
The process of optimising these procedures generally involves improving the sequence of the activities making up the procedure and/or modifying, replacing, adding or deleting activities of the procedure. Typically, the possible alterations to a procedure are numerous. Some alterations will improve the procedure while others will be detrimental to the procedure. There may also be conflicting requirements placed on the procedure, for example, one requirement may be minimising costs, while another may be improving quality, in which case alternatives to the existing procedure may be advantageous in relation to one requirement whilst being detrimental in relation to another requirement.
A number of different types of tool are known for use in the development or re-engineering of procedures. There are tools that provide a uniform way of mapping the activities making up the procedure and their sequence. Others provide a methodological framework to direct the thinking of the user. It is also known to provide a computer based handbook as is described in WO94/19742, where the handbook contains a library of procedures which can be used to present the user with a possible operating sequence, or more usually a series of alternative operating sequences from which one can be chosen and modified if desired.
The known mapping tools enable a structured description of procedures and are useful for capturing information about existing procedures and for describing new or re-engineered procedures once they have been developed, but they provide no assistance in the development process itself. They also tend to encourage the user to take an existing description of the current procedure as the starting point for the development work, and so mitigate against any consideration of radical changes. The methodological tools that aim to stimulate the user to consider alternative approaches on the other hand have the weakness that they do not provide detailed information of the procedures available in any easily retrievable way and so tend to be relatively inefficient and costly in terms of time. The computer-based handbooks referred to are able to capture, and classify in a easily accessible manner, detailed descriptions of existing procedures, but they offer little assistance in envisaging radically different procedures.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is aimed at addressing some of the shortcomings of the known tools referred to above in providing a data processing method and a computer based data processing system for use in providing a procedure for generating a product.
In one aspect, the present invention provides a method of optimising an industrial procedure for a product, using a database comprising:
(a) generic product descriptions of product physical and/or functional elements and associated properties,
(b) generic descriptions of processing elements and capabilities in relation to the procedure, and a series of rules relating to (a) and (b); specific product information being provided in terms of said generic product descriptions, including product constraints in terms of said associated properties, and the rules being operated to derive for the specific product information, from the data of (a) and (b)
(i) a selection of valid combinations of (a) and (b) as industrial activities, and
(ii) an arrangement of the activities of (i) in order.
It is also possible to employ the series of rules so as to obtain additionally:
(iii) a derivation from (a) and (b) of a measure of effort to perform each activity, and
(iv) integration of the results of (iii) for individual activities to derive a measure of the total effort required.
The constraints included in the specific product information can typically include requirements such as desired levels of efficiency of performance, specific dimensional tolerances of a physical product, acceptable levels of risk and/or a maximum duration for the procedure to be carried out for the product. These can be expected to affect the choice of procedure and its manner of performance in many instances. The operation of the rules therefore preferably also derives a prediction of the ability of the procedure to meet the constraints set.
Using generic product and process descriptions as a basis for developing procedures for a specific product helps avoid the inherent constraints of the known mapping tools and computer handbooks, which necessarily take specific product and procedure descriptions as their starting points. It thus facilitates radical departures from existing specific procedures for a specific product. For example, it might be that the specific procedures from which the generic descriptions of processing elements have been derived relate to products quite different in many respects from the specific product for which the new procedure is being developed, although prejudices in the art would inhibit any linking of those specific procedures with that product.
Advantageously the method of the invention is able to provide a detailed procedure description from which can be derived other results, for use with process visualisation tools and workflow planning tools for example.
The generic descriptions of processing elements may be derived from existing procedures for specific products. For example, specific activities of the same general class (e.g. analysis activities, definition activities etc.) can be analysed for a number of different procedures applied to a number of different products to extract from them a generic description of that class of activity as a processing element.
The database will typically include generic descriptions of processing elements for a plurality of different classes of activity (analysis, definition etc). For the or each class, there may be a number of different processing elements described at differing levels of abstraction. That is, some elements may be generally applicable to many different classes of procedure (design, manufacture, etc) and/or classes of product (mechanical, electronic, etc), while others may be of more limited application.
The rules used to derive the arrangement of the industrial activities, that is the valid combinations of generic product and processing element descriptions, may also be derived from existing, preferably best practice, procedures for specific products. In one form, these rules can be expressed as one or more process equations, the or each equation defining a sequence of generic processing elements as a generic process.
In another instance, in particular design and development procedures, but also some manufacturing procedures, the sequence of activities making up the procedure will include iterative activities where iterations of an activity or group of activities may be necessary to arrive at a valid output. For example, in a design procedure one might define a component part of a product and analyse the performance of that component in relation to constraints (eg. life, weight, cost etc.) associated with the product, repeating these activities a number of times before a component design is arrived at wh
Milton Nicholas R
Riley Paul H
Manelli Denison & Selter PLLC
Picard Leo
Rapp Chad
Rolls-Royce plc
Taltavull W. Warren
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