ExProMod, a Product Development Support Tool

The initial investigations are presented into three equipment design and manufacture companies, and their issues relating to information loss and inaccuracies, and present the employment of an extended product model framework to assist the engineers in overcoming the issues identified. Three key scientific issues in this field are addressed. They are the customer driven goals and practices, design change capture and product models, and the methodology employed to answer the problem stated. The information generated during the service engineer’s visit and the redesign process is encapsulated within a new ExProMod, so that it could potentially be revisited and retrieved throughout the whole product life. A case study has shown that the proposed ExProMod is able to record the information generated in a constraint-based design/redesign so that it has the capability to assist the designers to assimilate and digest constraint-based design, assist the designers to assimilate and digest constraint-based design, offer information management benefits for the machine redesign in the industry, and Presents a tool to capture redesign changes and their respective rationale. In addition, the directions for future research are also prospected.