Enforcing front-loading in engineering processes through product-process integration

Front-Loading in product engineering is the art of shifting important decisions about process parameters into the very early design phases. These decisions will have to cover parameters of the product as well as its production. Front-Loading requires the integration of different engineering disciplines like product, process and manufacturing design and their dependencies. These disciplines adopt different modeling approaches and incompatible tools, which increases the effort for Front-Loading. This paper presents an approach for interoperability between models coming from different disciplines in order to facilitate integrated engineering during the first design phases by integrating product and process models and evaluate these. In addition, a contextual modeling approach for reducing model complexity to different stakeholder is introduced. The entire work is explained along an industrial use case in aircraft engineering.