12.5FUTURE TRENDS IN CAD
3.12.5
Future
Trends
in CAD: Multidisciplinary
Concurrent
Design/Engineering
and Global
Manufacturing
For a variety of cultural reasons, today's industrial growth is more and more
dependent on situations where
large businesses are distributed.
Often these large
business organizations are split up but then orchestrated over several continents,
perhaps to take advantage of excellent design teams in one country and low-cost,
efficient manufacturing teams in another. These trends place even more emphasis on
concurrent engineering (or simultaneous design) and design for manufacturability
and assembly
(DFMlA).
The goals are to coordinate all members of a design and
manufacturing team at each stage of product development, manufacturing, sales,and
service (see Urban et aI., 1999).
To further complicate such trends, engineering products are more complex.
Concurrent engineering is difficult enough when the product is nearly all mechan-
ical (such as a gear box) or nearly all electronic (such as a television). But as auto-
mobiles, aircraft, robots, and computers become a highly complex mix of integrated
circuits, power supplies, controllers, and mechanical actuators, concurrent engi-
neering becomes even more challenging. It clearly demands the orchestration of
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3.32
'Irade-offe between nonparametric systems, parametric constraint-based, full feature-based,
and part family CAD systems (courtesy of 1. 1. Shah).