Abstract

Automotive manufacturers are challenged by a growing number of product derivatives, decreasing sales figures of each product, shorter product life cycles and increasing market dynamics. There is a strong need for a competitive cost-optimal engineering and production. Therefore multidisciplinary requirements have to be taken into account in early phases of the product development process. The tool helping to consider these requirements could be a designer-assistance which is embedded in the CAD-System. On the one hand the assistance supports the designer to comply with the defined process in an easy way and collecting necessary data for the downstream process. On the other hand the designer can be triggered by the assistance to follow production planning requirements which are implemented through checklists. So assistances prepare a bidirectional workflow between product development and production planning. Further assistances help to restore the information in the main database in a standardized format. A second step is to implement an early common Digital Mock-Up, the “Advanced DMU”. This kind of DMU combines product, process and resource information in early phases of product development to put a product and production validation into effect. This would be the change from a static to a dynamic DMU.