Modeling for engineering processes in integrated robot definition

Engineering in product definition traditionally concentrates on building structures of parts and assemblies. Other objects such as analysis results, manufacturing methods, and equipment control programs are mapped to part and assembly definitions. This style of engineering has been realized in model and simulation based product development. Product data management systems as extensions to product modeling and simulation systems were forced to apply engineering process definition for organization of group work. Some drawback of the above modeling motivated the authors to define an additional content based extension to current product modeling and simulation for entities of human intent, engineering objectives and decisions. In this paper, the authors analyze characteristics the above process elements and features and define typical engineering processes. Problems with the currently applied product model and an earlier proposed solution by the application of information content based product model extension are introduced. Following this, four typical information content based engineering processes are explained. Finally, robot system is characterized together with its environmental model as a well suitable product for the proposed modeling.