Feature-based Design and its Impact on Agile Product Development

This paper focuses on the importance of customer-driven design within the whole product development chain. Some essential requirements for the computer-based representation of customized products using the feature pradigm are identified as follows: First, for supporting the intuitive and creative work of the designer features have to be defined using data with different complexity and at different levels of abstraction. Second, for rapidly meeting customer needs facilities have to be provided for easy and fast redesign based on parametrics and variational design methods and tools. Third, to shorten the time to market and improve product quality and effectiveness features have to accompany the product development process from customer request through to product release. And fourth, to be integrated in different CAD/CAM environments, feature-based design tools should have an open and modular architecture. To satisfy these requirements, we introduce a concept for agile product design base d on features and propose SINFONIA, a subsystem for featur-based design as a part of an agile product development chain. SINFONIA has an open and modular architecture that allows to odify and extend existing functionalities, and to support different applications. Two main modules are the Feature Modeler and the Design Feature Manager. The Feature Modeler, which is completely application independent, provides funtionalities for the creation and manipulation of the feature-based model. The Design Feature Manager allows the feature data and the design process to be managed in an application-oriented way, thus realizing the communication with the underlying solid modeler, the user interface, and the consistency manager