Modeling and Analyzing Concurrent Design Process for Manufacturing Enterprise Information Systems

Information is a very important resource in manufacturing systems. The vagueness or lack of information leads to uncertainty and information flow conflicts in designing complex engineering products. The formal realization of concurrent design process for manufacturing enterprise information systems is the sticking point of design process management. This paper proposes a novel method of modeling and analyzing for concurrent design process based on the unified modeling language (UML) and the polychromatic sets (PS) theory. Together with the feature-based part design and process planning, UML model of concurrent design process is established using the basic model primitives and constructs of UML activity diagram. According to the mapping principles, UML mode of feature-based part design and process planning is mapped formally into PS contour matrix model. Based on PS contour matrix, the model reduction, path search and time consumption of concurrent design process are analyzed quantitatively and the opportunities are discovered to improve concurrent design process.