Now showing 1 - 10 of 60
  • Publication
    Competing in engineering design - the role of virtual product creation
    ( 2010)
    Stark, R.
    ;
    Krause, F.-L.
    ;
    Kind, C.
    ;
    Rothenburg, U.
    ;
    Müller, P.
    ;
    Hayka, H.
    ;
    Stöckert, H.
    Product creation is facing the next level of fundamental changes. Global demands are growing substantially to achieve energy efficient and sustainable value creation networks for production, products and services without compromising traditional success factors such as time to market, cost and quality. To stay competitive within such an environment development partners in industry and public sectors will require new interplay solutions for engineering design execution, domain knowledge representation, expert competence utilization and digital assistance systems. This scenario offers the chance for virtual production creation solutions to become critical for the future by offering unique engineering capabilities, which have not yet been explored or deployed. The paper investigates key elements of modern Virtual Product Creation - such as agile process execution, functional product modeling and context appropriate information management - towards their competitive role in satisfying increasing numbers of product requirements, in delivering robust systems integration and in ensuring true sustainable product lifecycle solutions.
  • Publication
    Evolutionary optimization of mass-spring models
    ( 2009)
    Völlinger, U.
    ;
    Stier, H.
    ;
    Priesnitz, J.
    ;
    Krause, F.-L.
    With present available solutions the interactive simulation of flexible parts in Virtual Reality (VR) applications is still a problem. Due to missing possibilities for the physically correct representation of deformation characteristics the informative capability of such simulations is reduced clearly. Considering the deformation of flexible parts is advantageous for a lot of applications like dynamic assembly/disassembly simulations or essential for virtual surgery simulations. Discrete approaches for simulations like mass-spring models are computationally efficient and can handle large deformations. Therefore they are suitable for real-time simulations, hence often used in interactive deformation simulations. There are however a few drawbacks concerning this model. The behaviour of this model is dependent on mesh resolution and topology. The main problem is to find suitable parameters for the spring elements. There is no analytic solution for direct distribution of ma terial properties in triangle or tetrahedral meshes. One approach to address the problem of finding appropriate mesh parameters is to use learning algorithms like simulated annealing, genetic algorithms or neural networks. Our method to identify the spring constants and simultaneously optimize the topology of the mesh is based on evolutionary algorithms. On this behalf, we combined functions for estimation, selection, recombination, and mutation inspired by biological evolution, which we adopted on a set of initialized meshes. Our method is suitable for triangle and tetrahedral meshes. Physically plausible deformation behaviour can be obtained by the optimized models within a certain scope of load. Compared to reference deformations, the initial deviation can be reduced by approximately 90% applying the optimization process.
  • Publication
    Meta-modelling for interoperability in product design
    ( 2007)
    Krause, F.-L.
    ;
    Kaufmann, U.
    Interoperability of tools for product design relies on the utilization of common information models like ISO 10303 STEP. However STEP is based on the EXPRESS modelling language which is not supported by state-of-the-art software development tools. To reuse the huge repository of information models defined in the STEP Application Protocols transformations into other representations are needed. A generic and sound approach is provided by OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) and Meta Object Facility (MOF). This paper describes meta-modelling methods and tools for the coexistence and integration of EXPRESS with UML, the commonly used modelling language in modern software development environments.
  • Publication
    Competence management for the optimisation of product development processes
    ( 2006)
    Krause, F.-L.
    ;
    Hacker, W.
    ;
    Debitz, U.
    ;
    Kind, C.
    ;
    Strebel, M.
    This paper presents a concept and a prototypical solution for the management of competences of engineers working in product development processes (PDP). Objectives are the representation of individual personnel competences, their utilisation for PDP planning activities such as the assignment of engineers to design tasks, and the support of human resources development. Main result is an instrument for the rational description of the expertise needed to process new orders and of the competencies of the engineering designers. The prototype implementation of the approach is based on a graph based structure and on rules representing competence requirements of PDP and human competence profiles, both processed by an interference mechanism.
  • Publication
    Virtual research lab: A new way to do research
    ( 2006)
    Tichkiewitch, S.
    ;
    Shpitalni, M.
    ;
    Krause, F.-L.
    Through the VRL-KCiP network of excellence, Europe is able to federate many research teams in the field of design, production and innovation and thus preserve its common inheritance of manufacturing processes while carrying out a collaborative system of design that integrates a module of virtual production. Twenty research units, comprised of 220 researchers, decided to work together in order to provide a strong integration of their teams and thus break the fragmentation of European research in this area and work more efficiently. A new organisation of the research system can only lead to a clearer vision of research orientations, improvement in the quality of research by exploiting complementarities, the avoidance of duplication, and finally a better impact on industry for the good health of our society.
  • Publication
    Potenziale der Grid-Technologie in der Produktentwicklung
    ( 2004)
    Krause, F.-L.
    ;
    Hayka, H.
    ;
    Gärtner, H.
    ;
    Langenberg, D.
  • Publication
    Adaptive modelling and simulation of product development processes
    ( 2004)
    Krause, F.-L.
    ;
    Kind, C.
    ;
    Voigtsberger, J.
  • Publication
    Kooperative Produktentstehung in vernetzten Unternehmen
    ( 2003)
    Krause, F.-L.
    ;
    Jansen, H.
    ;
    Schultz, R.
    Scientific forecasts years ago announced the virtualisation of computer-aided product development for the near future [1], The discussed change is already undergoing a gradual start and reveals itself in changed company structures and mew paradigms for the future course of action. Without the spectacular developments of information technology, changes accelerated in such a way are, however, barely conceivable. This article presents a number of recent new developments in IT that are designed to be used as cooperation tools for distributed virtual product development in networked companies.