XML-based concurrent and integrated ergonomic analysis in PLM

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is an innovative manufacturing paradigm that allows a company's engineering contents to be developed and integrated with all business processes through the entire product lifecycle in the extended enterprise. PLM extends PPR (product, process and manufacturing resource) content knowledge into other enterprise business processes by coupling e-business technologies with applications focused on the product development and production, such as ergonomic analysis. In PLM, most researches focus on the product information, which has been managed separately from manufacturing information including process, resource, and human. For activities such as process and operation planning, esign for manufacturing and assembly (DFMA) analysis, equipment and tool design, workstation design, the ergonomic analysis must be performed concurrently with the planning, and in a manner that integrates it with the entire product lifecycle. To achieve concurrent and integrated ergonomic analysis, an integrated schema that includes the product, process, manufacturing resource and human is essential. In this paper, PPR ^+H is defined and suggested as an XML-based approach to manage and integrate all the information necessary for ergonomic analysis. This approach includes the product, process, manufacturing resource, and human information in PLM, and also includes the relations among these elements. And, we develop the PPR^+H Integrator to support a concurrent and integrated ergonomic analysis. This tool can extract PPR and human information from company's diverse legacy systems, such as roduct data management (PDM) and manufacturing process management (MPM). We suggest implementations and present a case study for an automotive general assembly shop showing that effective and reliable ergonomic analysis is possible, and can be performed in a concurrent and integrated manner.