Background
A configurable product platform is an efficient way to handle a wide range of product variation and offering and at the same time utilize a limited number of parts and components. To manage this in the different processes in the company, the product documentation is managed through a PDM system. However, when the variation of the product offering is increasing over time - including merger and acquisitions of companies– the environment for the engineer, when doing product changes, becomes more and more complex despite the support from the PDM system. Therefore, in the PDM system there is a need to organize the data into manageable subunits in order to reduce the complexity for the engineer. Different solutions on the organization of subunits will have different impact on the engineering documentation efficiency and an optimization is needed.

The purpose of this project is to create tools and strategies in order to understand what’s driving documentation complexity, how to reduce it in order to make engineering documentation more efficient. The project will investigate the way in which the product definition information is organized and managed across the product lifecycle, including the main business processes, Product Development, Sales-to-Order, Order-to-Delivery, and Delivery-to-Repurchase. The project addressed the following research questions:

1. What is a good set of configuration rules and how should it be structured?
2. What is an efficient process for formulating/using/maintaining the configuration rules?
3. How can the documentation of the configuration rules be improved?
4. How can the system support for formulating/using/maintaining configuration rules be improved ?

The project is ProViking II project and is a cooperation between Volvo 3P, Volvo Cars, Saab Automobile, the Fraunhofer-Chalmers Centrum (FCC) and Wingquist Laboratory at Chalmers.

Dr Johan Malmqvist, professor, project leader
Anna Tidstam, industrial PhD student (Volvo 3P)
Lic Eng Fredrik Ekstedt (FCC)
Dr Johan Carlson (FCC)
Alexey Voronov, PhD student, Signal and Systems
Sajed Miremadi, PhD student, Signal and Systems
Dr Knut Åkesson, Signal and Systems
Dr Martin Fabian, professor, Signal and Systems