Produkte werden heutzutage in heterogenen Software- und Organisationsstrukturen entwickelt. Zur Vorauslegung dienen häufig spezialisierte Programme, die konstruktive Umsetzung erfolgt in kommerziellen Systemen (z .B. Creo, Catia usw.). Zur mechanischen Auslegung werden sowohl FEM-Systeme als auch selbst entwickelte Programme genutzt, oft schon in der Vertriebsphase. Obwohl die Datenbasis bei allen Systemen ähnlich ist, müssen Daten aufgrund von Inkompatibilitäten oft mehrfach manuell eingegeben werden. Die bedeutet Prozessunsicherheit und überflüssige Mehrarbeit. Produktkonfiguratoren sollen dies vermeiden. Sie werden zu Beginn mit den relevanten Daten gefüllt und stellen eine Schnittstelle für alle beteiligten Systemen zur Verfügung. Dadurch wird die Datenverwaltung vereinfacht und die Prozesssicherheit wesentlich erhöht.

Užsakovams pritaikytų gaminių projektavimo procesas šiuo metu yra paplitęs mašinų gamyboje ir kitose pramonės šakose. Šio proceso metu gaminio konstrukcija keičiama atsižvelgiant į užsakovo poreikius. Tokie gaminiai yra metalo ir medžio apdirbimo staklės, liftai, eskalatoriai, kranai, sunkvežimiai ir pan. Nors pritaikytas pagal poreikius gaminys yra brangesnis už serijiniu būdu padarytus gaminius, tačiau jis žymiai pigesnis už vienetinius gaminius. Mašinų ir įrenginių konstrukcijos projektams sudaryti iš sudedamųjų dalių yra naudojami gaminio konfigūravimo metodai. Šių metodų pagrindinis trūkumas yra tas, kad papildyti gaminio konfigūravimo modelį yra sudėtinga. Kuriant naujus gaminių konstrukcijų variantus yra naudojamos tik modelyje esančios sudedamosios dalys, bet nenumatomas būdas kurti naują konstrukcijos projektą iš labiausiai panašios modelyje esančios gaminio konstrukcijos. Nepakankamai įvertinama, kad gaminio konfigūravimo modelis dažnai keičiamas ir tobulinamas. Taip pat reikalinga galimybė gaminio konfigūravimo modelyje kurti naujas sudedamąsias dalis, plečiant gaminių pasiūlą ir atsiradus naujiems užsakovų poreikiams. Šio darbo tikslas – sukurti gaminio konstrukcijos variantų sudarymo ir parinkimo metodą, kurį taikant būtų greičiau ir lengviau kuriami nauji gaminio konstrukcijos modelio variantai naudojant sudedamąsias dalis, jų savybes ir galimų ryšių tarp sudedamųjų dalių ribojimus. Siekiant tikslo, buvo sprendžiami šie uždaviniai: ištirti esamus gaminio... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / In modern business of machine manufacturing, there is a growing tendency towards design of custom tailored products. The construction of the product usually is changed during the customization according to the requirements of the customer. The examples of such products are refrigerators, metal and wood processing machines, elevators, escalators, hoisting cranes, trucks, etc. Customizable products of this type are more expensive than mass or batch produced ones, but they are much less expensive than one-off or small batch production. The product configuration methods are used for creating construction variants. These methods contain two main phases: initially a set of all available variants of product construction are modeled, later a specific product variant is selected with respect to the customer’s criteria. This set of all product variants is further called the product configuration model. If there is no such construction variant that meets customer’s requirements in the product configuration model created in advance, then the new variant has to be designed and included into the configuration model. The aim of this work is to develop the method for defining variants of product’s construction. Using this method, new variants of product construction model should be created faster and easier, being composed from the constituent parts, their properties, and constraints defining relations of the parts. Following tasks were accomplished in this work: to analyze the existing... [to full text]

In modern business of machine manufacturing, there is a growing tendency towards design of custom tailored products. The construction of the product usually is changed during the customization according to the requirements of the customer. The examples of such products are refrigerators, metal and wood processing machines, elevators, escalators, hoisting cranes, trucks, etc. Customizable products of this type are more expensive than mass or batch produced ones, but they are much less expensive than one-off or small batch production. The product configuration methods are used for creating construction variants. These methods contain two main phases: initially a set of all available variants of product construction are modeled, later a specific product variant is selected with respect to the customer’s criteria. This set of all product variants is further called the product configuration model. If there is no such construction variant that meets customer’s requirements in the product configuration model created in advance, then the new variant has to be designed and included into the configuration model. The aim of this work is to develop the method for defining variants of product’s construction. Using this method, new variants of product construction model should be created faster and easier, being composed from the constituent parts, their properties, and constraints defining relations of the parts. Following tasks were accomplished in this work: to analyze the existing... [to full text] / Užsakovams pritaikytų gaminių projektavimo procesas šiuo metu yra paplitęs mašinų gamyboje ir kitose pramonės šakose. Šio proceso metu gaminio konstrukcija keičiama atsižvelgiant į užsakovo poreikius. Tokie gaminiai yra metalo ir medžio apdirbimo staklės, liftai, eskalatoriai, kranai, sunkvežimiai ir pan. Nors pritaikytas pagal poreikius gaminys yra brangesnis už serijiniu būdu padarytus gaminius, tačiau jis žymiai pigesnis už vienetinius gaminius. Mašinų ir įrenginių konstrukcijos projektams sudaryti iš sudedamųjų dalių yra naudojami gaminio konfigūravimo metodai. Šių metodų pagrindinis trūkumas yra tas, kad papildyti gaminio konfigūravimo modelį yra sudėtinga. Kuriant naujus gaminių konstrukcijų variantus yra naudojamos tik modelyje esančios sudedamosios dalys, bet nenumatomas būdas kurti naują konstrukcijos projektą iš labiausiai panašios modelyje esančios gaminio konstrukcijos. Nepakankamai įvertinama, kad gaminio konfigūravimo modelis dažnai keičiamas ir tobulinamas. Taip pat reikalinga galimybė gaminio konfigūravimo modelyje kurti naujas sudedamąsias dalis, plečiant gaminių pasiūlą ir atsiradus naujiems užsakovų poreikiams. Šio darbo tikslas – sukurti gaminio konstrukcijos variantų sudarymo ir parinkimo metodą, kurį taikant būtų greičiau ir lengviau kuriami nauji gaminio konstrukcijos modelio variantai naudojant sudedamąsias dalis, jų savybes ir galimų ryšių tarp sudedamųjų dalių ribojimus. Siekiant tikslo, buvo sprendžiami šie uždaviniai: ištirti esamus gaminio... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

This thesis deals with the problem of technical product configuration: Connect individual components conforming to a component catalogue in order to meet a given objective while respecting certain constraints. Solving such configuration problems is one of the major success stories of applied AI research: In industrial environments they support the configuration of complex products and, compared to manual processes, help to reduce error rates and increase throughput. Practical applications are nowadays ubiquitous and range from configurable cars to the configuration of telephone communication switching units. In the classical definition of a configuration problem the number of components to be used is fixed while in practice, however, the number of components needed is often not easily stated beforehand. Existing knowledge representation (KR) formalisms expressive enough to deal with this dynamic aspect of configuration require that explicit bounds on all generated components are given as well as extensive knowledge about the underlying solving algorithms. To date there is still a lack of high-level KR tools being able to cope with these demands. In this work we present LoCo, a fragment of classical first order logic that has been carefully tailored for expressing technical product configuration problems. The core feature of LoCo is that the number of components used in configurations does not have to be finitely bounded explicitly, but instead is bounded implicitly through the axioms. We identify configurations with models of the logic; hence, configuration finding becomes model finding. LoCo serves as a high-level representation language which allows the modelling of general configuration problems in an intuitive and declarative way without the need of having knowledge about underlying solving algorithms; in fact, the specification gets automatically translated into low-level executable code. LoCo allows translations into different target languages. We present the language, related algorithms and complexity results as well as a prototypical implementation via answer-set programming.

Produkte werden heutzutage in heterogenen Software- und Organisationsstrukturen entwickelt. Zur Vorauslegung dienen häufig spezialisierte Programme, die konstruktive Umsetzung erfolgt in kommerziellen Systemen (z .B. Creo, Catia usw.). Zur mechanischen Auslegung werden sowohl FEM-Systeme als auch selbst entwickelte Programme genutzt, oft schon in der Vertriebsphase. Obwohl die Datenbasis bei allen Systemen ähnlich ist, müssen Daten aufgrund von Inkompatibilitäten oft mehrfach manuell eingegeben werden. Die bedeutet Prozessunsicherheit und überflüssige Mehrarbeit. Produktkonfiguratoren sollen dies vermeiden. Sie werden zu Beginn mit den relevanten Daten gefüllt und stellen eine Schnittstelle für alle beteiligten Systemen zur Verfügung. Dadurch wird die Datenverwaltung vereinfacht und die Prozesssicherheit wesentlich erhöht.

Dans le contexte actuel de compétitivité des marchés, la maîtrise et l'optimisation des processus de conception et de planification sont nécessaires pour garantir, d'une part la fiabilité et la qualité des produits systèmes ou services conçus et, d'autre part, le cycle de développement et les coûts. Ce constat impose de développer et d'améliorer les méthodes, modèles, techniques et outils relatifs aux processus de conception et de gestion ou de planification. Les travaux présentés dans cette thèse s'inscrivent dans ce contexte et proposent de mettre en relation ou encore de faire intéragir la configuration de produit avec la planification du projet de réalisation. Le but de ces travaux est d'apporter une aide à la décision pour le couplage de la configuration de produit et de la planification du projet associé, en exploitant deux outils issus de l'Intelligence Artificielle : les approches par contraintes et les algorithmes évolutionnaires. Cette aide à la décision est présentée en deux parties. La première partie décrit l'utilisation des approches par contraintes afin de permettre au décideur de configurer son produit et son projet de réalisation de manière simultanée et interactive. Pour ce faire, les techniques de propagation et de filtrage des contraintes sont exploitées spécifiquement. La deuxième partie s'intéresse à l'exploitation des algorithmes évolutionnaires pour optimiser l'espace de solutions selon les critères coût et délai afin de présenter au décideur, un ensemble réduit de solutions optimisées. Un algorithme SPEA2 modifié en intégrant des méthodes de filtrage dans ses opérateurs de parcours de l'espace de recherche y est présenté. Toutes nos propositions sont illustrées sur un exemple d'avion de tourisme et d'affaire. / In the actual context of market the control and optimization of design processes are essential to ensure on the one hand, the reliability and quality of products, on the other hand the development time and costs. This phenomenon involves the constant development of methodologies, in order to improve the diversity and quality of the product and at the same time to shorten their development time and decrease their cost The work presented in this thesis fits into this context and propose to associate products configuration and production process planning. The aim of this work is to provide decision support for the coupling of onfiguration products and the associate production process leveraging two tools of Artificial Intelligence : constraints approaches and evolutionary algorithms. This decision support is presented in two parts. The first part decribes the use of constraints approaches to allow decison-maker to configure product and its production process simultaneously and interactively. For this aim, propagation and filtring techniques are exploited specifically. The second part deals with the use of evolutionary algorithms to optimize the space solutions according to time and cost criteria in order to provide a small set of optimized solutions to the decision-maker. SPEA2 algorithm modified by incorporating filtering methods in its evolutionary operators. All our proposals ara illustrated on an exemple of light aitcraft.

L’intérêt des différents langages de la famille des diagrammes de décisionvalués (VDD) est qu’ils admettent des algorithmes en temps polynomialpour des traitements (comme l’optimisation, la cohérence inverse globale,l’inférence) qui ne sont pas polynomiaux (sous l’hypothèse P 6= NP), si ilssont effectués sur le problème dans sa forme originale tel que les réseaux decontraintes ou les réseaux bayésiens.Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons au problème de configuration deproduit, et plus spécifiquement, la configuration en ligne avec fonction de valuationassociée (typiquement, un prix). Ici, la présence d’un utilisateur enligne nous impose une réponse rapide à ses requêtes, rapidité rendant impossiblel’utilisation de langages n’admettant pas d’algorithmes en temps polynomialpour ces requêtes. La solution proposée est de compiler hors-ligneces problèmes vers des langages satisfaisant ces requêtes, afin de diminuer letemps de réponse pour l’utilisateur.Une première partie de cette thèse est consacrée à l’étude théorique desVDD, et plus particulièrement les trois langages Algebraic Decision Diagrams,Semi ring Labelled Decision Diagrams et Affine Algebraic Decision Diagrams(ADD, SLDD et AADD). Nous y remanions le cadre de définition des SLDD,proposons des procédures de traductions entre ces langages, et étudions la compacitéthéorique de ces langages. Nous établissons dans une deuxième partie lacarte de compilation de ces langages, dans laquelle nous déterminons la complexitéalgorithmique d’un ensemble de requêtes et transformations correspondantà nos besoins. Nous proposons également un algorithme de compilationà approche ascendante, ainsi que plusieurs heuristiques d’ordonnancement devariables et contraintes visant à minimiser la taille de la représentation aprèscompilation ainsi que le temps de compilation. Enfin la dernière partie estconsacrée à l’étude expérimentale de la compilation et de l’utilisation de formescompilées pour la configuration de produit. Ces expérimentations confirmentl’intérêt de notre approche pour la configuration en ligne de produit.Nous avons implémenté au cours de cette thèse un compilateur (le compilateurSALADD) pleinement fonctionnel, réalisant la compilation de réseauxde contraintes et de réseaux bayésiens, et avons développés un ensemble defonctions adaptées à la configuration de produit. Le bon fonctionnement etles bonnes performances de ce compilateur ont été validés via un protocole devalidation commun à plusieurs solveurs. / The different languages from the valued decision diagrams (VDD) family benefitfrom polynomial-time algorithms for some tasks of interest (such as optimization,global inverse consistency, inference) for which no polynomial-timealgorithm exists (unless P = NP) when the input is a constraint network ora Bayesian network considered at start.In this thesis, we focus on configuration product problems, and more specificallyon-line configuration with an associated valuation function (typically, aprice). In this case, the existence of an on-line user forces us to quickly answerto his requests, making impossible the use of languages that does not admitpolynomial-time algorithm for this requests. Therefore, our solution consistsin an off-line compilation of these problems into languages that admit suchpolynomial-time algorithms, and thus decreasing the latency for the user.The first part of this thesis is dedicated to the theoretical study of VDDs,an more specifically Algebraic Decision Diagrams (ADDs), Semi ring LabelledDecision Diagrams (SLDDs) and Affine Algebraic Decision Diagrams(AADDs). We revisit the SLDD framework, propose translation proceduresbetween these languages and study the succinctness of these languages. In asecond part, we establish a knowledge compilation map of these languages,in which we determine the complexity of requests and transformations correspondingto our needs. We also propose a bottom-up compilation algorithmand several variables and constraints ordering heuristics whose aim is to reducethe size of the compiled form, and the compilation time. The last partis an experimental study of the compilation and the use of the compiled formin product configuration. These experimentations confirm the interest of ourapproach for on-line product configuration.We also implemented a fully functional bottom-up compiler (the SALADDcompiler), which is capable of compiling constraints network and Bayesian networkinto SLDDs. We also developed a set of functions dedicated to productconfiguration. The proper functioning and good performances of this programwas validated by a validation protocol common to several solvers.

Product configuration systems (PCS) have the ability to significantly streamline the internal sales process within engineering-to-order (ETO) companies due to its ability to e.g. automate design and quotation processes. This is made possible through the accumulation of product specific knowledge put into a software which is used to create customer adaptable products at lower costs. PCS development is regarded resource heavy endeavors, and many projects have thus a hard time achieving an overall profitability. Recent studies have tried to establish frameworks that supports companies in achieving successful implementation processes. However, these studies mainly focus on technical implications and monetary benefits while lacking to establish and consider a comprehensive picture for the likelihood of PCS success. Thereby, this case study establishes a holistic framework for executives of ETO companies to consider when deciding on whether to invest in a PCS. The findings show that PCS provides benefits to its adopting organization by reducing engineering time and lead time during the sales process, increasing product specification quality, improving knowledge facilitation, contributing to the development of a streamlining mindset among its employees and provide the organization with an increased digital agility. For the organization to reap these benefits, it is highly dependent on its current setting (e.g. available resources, competences, organizational identity etc.), which should be evaluated thoroughly before deciding for investment. The study show that PCS investment should, in addition to streamlining sales process, be seen as a strategic investment. In a society influenced by digital solutions, PCS investment can be regarded a catalyst for organizations to become malleable, which have been suggested as a prerequisite for organizations in order to adopt to a digitally driven business environment. Additionally, implementing a PCS showed to contribute to the three pillars of sustainability by streamlining both the sales process as well as the, to some extent, assembly and production processes.

Many companies are using platform-based product designs to fulfill the requirements of customers while maintaining low cost. However, research that integrates sustainability into platform-based product design is still limited. Considering sustainability during platform-based design process is a challenge because the total life-cycle from pre-manufacturing, manufacturing and use to post-use stages as well as economic, environmental and societal performance in these stages must be considered. In this research, an approach for quantifying sustainability is introduced and a mathematical model is developed for identifying a more sustainable platform. Data from life-cycle assessment is used to quantify environmental factors; criteria from the Product Sustainability Index (ProdSI) are used to quantify societal factors. The Analytic Hierarchical Process method is used to assess relative importance of societal factors and the weighted sum method is used in the objective function for overall multi-objective optimization. A bicycle platform configuration will be used as a case study to demonstrate the application of the model. The relationship between commonality of the platform and sustainability performance is analyzed.

Le système PLM est l’un des outils stratégiques de l’entreprise. Ces systèmes sont sujets à des changements récurrents dans l’entreprise. Les évolutions organisationnelles, le changement de l’offre produit ou encore le remplacement de logiciels PLM peuvent déclencher l’évolution du système d’information PLM. Une des structures les plus importantes dans les systèmes PLM est le modèle du produit, autour duquel s’articule les informations et processus. C’est autour du modèle produit que se concentrent nos recherches. Les causes d’évolution des modèles produits sont des éléments signifiants qui différencient les étapes de la démarche à suivre. Les méthodes d’IDM sont utilisées afin de formaliser la transformation des modèles. En plus, cette démarche bénéfice d’un cadre de similarité spécialement développé pour la configuration de produit. Un exemple industriel est illustré et résolu en appliquant cette démarche. Il s’agit de l’évolution d’un système gérant les modèles spécifiques de produit vers un système qui est capable de construire et d’utiliser les modèles génériques de produit. Un outil informatique support à nos travaux est développé dans le cadre d'Eclipse. / PLM systems are among the strategic components of enterprise’s information system architecture. These systems undergo frequent evolutions of enterprise. Organizational evolution or product offer variation as well as PLM application replacement may launch PLM systems’ evolution.One of the important structures in PLM systems is the product configuration, which organize and structure all product’s information and processes. Our research activities concern product model evolution. Reasons of product model evolution specify the appropriate methodology and necessary steps in order to handle it. MDE methods are used to formalize the model transformation process.Moreover, our methodology contains a specific similarity framework dedicated to product configuration. An industrial example was illustrated and resolved by this methodology. The problematic of this example is the migration of a system which manage only specific product configuration to a new system that is capable to construct and use generic models of product.