Active catalogs: Integrated support for component engineering

A recent National Academy of Sciences study shows that design and manufacturing is dominated by three eighty percent rules. Eighty percent of the cost of a product typically is the purchase cost of its components. Eighty percent of the manufacturing costs are determined in the first twenty percent of the design phase. And eighty percent of an engineer's time is spent not on design, but on communications: obtaining information about components comprising the design and coordinating with other engineers about design issues. Thus, the speed and quality of product development is heavily dependent on a designer's ability to perform component engineering - to configure a set of components that work well together with respect to performance, reliability, cost and delivery schedule. This paper describes services provided in the Active Catalogs system that support the component engineering process. These services enable a designer not only to find candidate parts to serve as individual components in a design, but to explore and assess interactions between candidate parts for sets of components. These services include mechanisms for: (1) creating queries for parts based on their intended use rather than merely parametric specifications; (2) refining those queries to take account of constraints imposed by other components; (3) providing multi-modal information to help designers assess and compare candidate parts; and (4) generating simulation models of candidate parts and integrating them to provide simulation models of candidate systems.