Research of design reuse in complex product integrated design systems

Complex product design is a cooperative process involving multidisciplinary teams that are assisted with different computational simulation tools. Therefore, it is very necessary to integrate the disparate software systems in the design environment to become part of the integrated design platform. Furthermore, reuse of the design data and knowledge that has been accumulated over the lifecycle of the design project is necessary to increase the design efficiency. To organize and manage the design process and data in an integrated platform and adapt to frequently changing requirements, business component is adopted in this paper to implement the integration of design data, resources, processes and graphic-user interfaces. A new digital specialized design component is constructed for the integration of design resources, and different user interfaces are customized for different resource versions. And then process template is designed for process-variable heterogeneous design data management and reuse. A process template centered design data integrated management architecture is designed which can provide an operational environment for the merge of engineering management and project management; it also implements design data and component reuse across different design projects. Combined with version management technology, it can also achieve the objective of cross-project design data reuse. Applications of the approaches in IMS-DATE and IMS-AFLD show that the digitalize components can implement the evolution management of different design modules.