iPROD - Integrated Product Development

Purpose and goal:

A large portion of Swedish industry offer Engineering-To-Order (ETO), customized and individualized products. Customized products undergo changes upon customer order and a considerable engineering activity is allocated for each customer. To stay competitive, the process for customized products needs to be rationalized and automated, in iPROD we propose to increase automation and integration of engineering activities from sales, through product and production development.

Expected results and effects:

By decreasing cost for customised products, the competitiveness of Swedish companies will increase. Cost decrease is achieved by automating manual processes and by reducing the number of errors, but also to apply smart production strategies by optimising virtual product and production data. One effect of these propositions is that Swedish companies can offer more cost efficient and customer specific solutions with reduced lead time.

Approach and implementation:

Time consuming, expensive and error-prone processes for customised products will be automated using digitalization techniques such as Design Automation (DA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Optimization and Machine Learning (ML). These technologies pave way for integrated product and production development which can improve competitiveness by taking advantage of large amounts of collected data to:

Automatic customized designs including Engineering drawings Automatic production planning Automatic generation of manufacturing data, such as code for NC-machines.