Know-how management for sheet metal forming and assembling 2000-05-0269

Aim of this paper is to present the design and implementation of an object- oriented Web Application devoted to the Know-How Management of the Sheet Metal Forming and Assembling operations for industrial vehicles area.

The need for such Application is in the line of today''s world of ever- shortening product life cycles, fast-moving markets where Knowledge Management constitutes the competitive advantage in the future of the companies for reacting to changing market conditions worldwide.

In the near past, men were the depository of the information, but the practical impossibility to keep everybody informed on all the projects, highlighted the convenience to use many different tools from diverse areas of expertise including databases to store data and make them available in other similar applications to different people at different levels of skill and experience.

In product and process design, the simultaneous engineering techniques changed the design approach requiring a quantitative assessment of the manufacturing feasibility of component design at the conceptual stage.

In this context the access to an organic system of know-how management, computer based, that quickly offers data and information to assume the preliminary decisions in the process design and process setup has been considered of fundamental importance.

Those kinds of data are very diverse, in content and format, representing, in synthesis what is called "Know How." The way in which the know-how is managed becomes then the key factor of any computer application.

The Application presented in this paper, concerning the stamping and assembling areas, shows an original approach based on the Object-Oriented techniques.

To define the conceptual model, data are organized in classes connected by a father-child link. Each class can have a well-defined role in the problem domain representing objects with well-known technological meaning (component, sample, stamping process, etc.). In each class technical data, images, graphics, animations, files, simulation models and external links can be managed.