THESIS FOR THE DEGREE OF LICENTIATE OF ENGINEERING
Towards Development Platforms
Models, Processes and IT-Tools for Platform-Based
Development across the Lifecycle
CHRISTOFFER E. LEVANDOWSKI
Department of Product and Production Development
CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
Gothenburg...
Department of Product and Production Development
Chalmers University of Technology
SE-412 96 Gothenburg
Sweden
Telephone + 46 (0)31-772 1000
Chalmers Reproservice
Gothenburg, Sweden 2012
,Abstract
Product developing companies strive to provide their customers with high quality
products, more quickly than their competitors, using as few resources as possible.
One way of managing all three aspects at the same time is to reuse old, quality
assured designs and knowledge in new products. A common way to do that is to
create a platform with designs that are reusable in many different products.
Traditionally, research on platforms has focused on finding ways to provide
manufacturing with a low number of parts to be able to increase utilization of
expensive production equipment. However, a designer needs more information than
just the physical form of a design in order to reuse the design to cut development
lead-time. The use of platforms based on core technologies and re-configurable
systems as platform elements may on the other hand give the needed support. These
types of platforms are here referred to as development platforms. This thesis
elaborates on support for working with development platforms that are integrated
across the lifecycle of a product.
The studies in this thesis show that platform approaches in literature today do not
cover the need to support holistic platform development across all stages of a
lifecycle. As a solution, configurable system elements may be used as a bridge
between abstract descriptions of platforms (e.g. technology platforms) and concrete
descriptions (e.g. part-based and module-based platforms).
Further, development platforms may be supported by a Product Lifecycle
Management (PLM) architecture for engineering-to-order configuration, but it can
also serve as a tool to learn about the knowledge gaps that need to be filled to get a
product to meet requirements. However, there is a great risk in trying to support
design reuse with IT-applications alone. In order to fully support platform-based
development, an organization needs to consider business objectives, processes,
information architecture and application architecture.
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