Architecture of the Product State Model Environment: The QualiGlobe Experience of Production Efficiency

This paper addresses the issue of using product models to support product lifecycle activities withparticular focus on the production phase. The motivation of the research is that products are producedmore costly and with longer lead-time than necessary.The paper provides a review of product modelling technologies and approaches, and the overallarchitecture for the Product State Model (PSM) Environment as a basis for quality monitoring.Especially, the paper focuses on the circumstances prevailing in a one-of-a-kind manufacturingenvironment like the shipbuilding industry, where product modelling technologies already haveproved their worth in the design and engineering phases of shipbuilding and in the operation phase.However, the handling of product information on the shop floor is not yet equally developed.The paper reports from the Brite-Euram project (No. BE97-4510) QualiGlobe focusing on thedevelopment activities of the PSM architecture. An example discusses how to handle product relatedinformation on the shop floor in a manufacturing company and focuses on how dynamically updatedproduct data can improve control of production activities. This prototype example of welding a jointbetween two steel plates serves as proof of concept for the PSM architecture.