The Product Data Management Group (PDMG) investigates how information technology can be used for the management of complex industrial products. The group concentrates on products that have many variants and long life-cycles. These products are typically found in discrete manufacturing industry. The group looks for practical solutions to real problems. Accordingly, most of the research is carried out in joint projects with the industry.
Projects:The software process research at Helsinki University of Technology has been initiated by the national software process management and improvement program ProHAKE.
The project is binding an Europe-wide network of research organizations interested in process modeling and product configuration. The research also has strong connections to Finnish industry. Current partners include Nokia Research Center, Nokia Cellular Systems, Brossco Systems Oy, DataFellows Oy, Stonesoft Oy, and JKO-Action Oy.
The research is lead by professor Reijo Sulonen and the project team includes Kari Alho, project manager, Casper Lassenius, Vesa Wäyrynen, Kai Risku, and Sakari Pihlava. The project are funded by TEKES and participating companies.
The research has been concentrated on two main areas of interest: software process improvement in small software houses producing shrink wrapped software, and development of methods and tools for supporting process modeling and enactment.
Small software houses typically develop software in completely ad-hoc ways. As the size of the company grows, the need for organized development becomes critical. The transition from ad-hoc development to a well defined software process is very difficult in all kinds of organizations. The problems are even worse in small companies, since they typically do not have the financial or personnel resources needed for process improvement as prescribed by the existing reference models like CMM or SPICE. This means that process improvement efforts have to be both simple and cheap. Also, the planning horizon of small companies is also typically very short, emphasizing the need for quick results.
Our research, therefore, has concentrated on developing simple methods for assessing the existing process in a small software organizations and developing it using light-weight methods that produce quick results without requiring excessive investments in terms of tool purchase or personnel allocation.
The profound lack of existing engineering environments with process support has been due to the separation of product and process concerns into totally different worlds. This can be seen for example from the very own vocabulary of the two research fields. The leading principle of the research taken place in the HUT is the joining of this dualism into a coherent conceptual framework.
During the ongoing research, the underlying concepts have been clarified and a working prototype capable of demonstrating some key issues has been developed. The studies aim to better understand the relationships of artifacts and activities, as well as bring in a flavor of product management. The chosen methodology has turned out to be very successful in describing the various relations of the process and product worlds in a uniform, simple and yet powerful manner.
The short term goals of the project are concentrated on developing a working environment for the process engineer with a capability to define, instantiate, monitor and change activities, as well as on producing a distributed process support system capable of performing these activities. In the long term, the research is aimed at developing process supporting software engineering environments, and at joining existing and well-understood configuration management systems into the flexible tool integration framework.
The members of the group are Prof. Reijo Sulonen, Asko Martio, Tomi Männistö, Hannu Peltonen, Timo Soininen and Juha Tiihonen. The project is funded by Academy of Finland (1994-1996) and Tekes (since 1996).
Product data plays an increasingly important role in the documents and files within information systems. A manufacturing company needs an information architecture that supports the management of all kinds of product data.
Product data management requires a flexible mechanism for specifying the structure and other properties of products. The project investigates generic product structures, which describe customer-specific product variation through alternative, optional and parametrised components. Generic product structures must allow product descriptions at different levels of abstraction (e.g., common properties of a product family and specific properties of a single product) and different points of view (e.g., design view and maintenance view).
One of the key issues in generic product structures is the long-term management of the product information. The project also investigates methods and mechanisms for modelling the evolution of both product families and delivered individual products.
This research project is linked with a PDM project at each partner company. The partners provide valuable information about the actual problems and solutions in the industry.
Product configuration is an important application for generic product structures.
There is an increasing demand for individually tailored products with short delivery times. This demand can be satisfied with configurable products, which can be easily customized according to customer specifications. Typically the products are assembled of (possibly) parametrized standard components that have been designed in advance.
The designers of a configurable product must devise a plan that can be used repeatedly for realizing customer orders as working combinations of the available components. Both technical and commercial restrictions must be considered. Typically some components and parameter values are fixed in advance, and rules or guidelines are given for determining the open components and parameters. We use the term product configuration model for this information. The concept is similar to some uses of the term product family.
After a customer has ordered a configurable product, the order and a product configuration model are used for creating a product configuration, which describes a single instance of the product. This is mostly routine design, which can take advantage of information technology. A configuration system can automate some tasks and interactively assist the user, for example by showing possible alternative components and by examining the validity of the final configuration.
The project makes an extensive survey of 10 Finnish companies that manufacture configurable products. The project develops a framework for evaluating the importance of configurable products at a company and the "skill level" of the company with respect to these products.
The project is closely related to the PDM project of the same group. The group includes following researchers: Juha Tiihonen, Timo Soininen, Tomi Männistö and Professor Reijo Sulonen. The funders of the project are Tekes and Academy of Finland