Integrated Methods and Tools for Product and Production Development

Today's markets demands ask more and more for a reduction of the time period between product invention and the production of new and innovative products. The consequent and integrated exploitation of methods and systems of product and production developoment provides one possibility for accelerating development processes and for manufacturing innovative products. This contribution depicts approaches to this field and introduces works of the Fraunhofer IPA which are concerned with integrated product and production development. The intention of the work is to move the whole system one step further towards the ideal of a completely integrated and rapid product and production development. New methods and opportunities allow for a number of improvements. In order to uncover hidden potential, the required processes must be integrated and shortened. Fraunhofer IPA makes use of this approach by involving the various research fields of its institute into a process chain in order to work on further improvement. This procedure includes a common developmental environment called the "Centre for Parallel Product and Production Development" for the ste-by-step integration of product and production development processes.