Formulation of a generic framework for integrated product and process development

Many research issues are being addressed concerning different aspects of product development problem. This paper indicates that most of these research issues have the same nature: performance optimization. Based on this, a generic framework for integrated product and process development is proposed. In this framework, a product's entire life cycle is considered and divided into a sequence of life phases. Each life phase transforms the product status from one to another and is represented as a set of processes. A general index vector is applied on each life phase to evaluate its corresponding performance. It may include cost, revenue, environmental impacts, etc. The index vectors, one for each life phase, are then gathered into an index matrix to evaluate the performance of the product's entire life cycle. The index matrix and its various transforms then serve as the optimization objective for different purposes. By this generic framework, most of the concerned issues are formally described as constrained optimization problems that could then be solved similarly.