Functional Relationship Management for Disposition Decisions
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Solution Overview
Problem
Manufacturers face challenges in making accurate and consistent disposition decisions for nonconforming components due to lack of data and reliance on historical experience and improvised solutions, leading to recalls, warranty repairs, and excess scrap.
Innovation Solution
A Functional Relationship Management (FRM) system that computes Functional Conditions as a function of Design Inputs, using engineering models and data from CAD, metrology, and FMEA to identify contributors, update conditions, and determine failure modes and risk indices, enabling rapid and informed decision-making.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If manufacturers rely on historical experience and improvised handwork solutions for disposition decisions, then decision-making speed is maintained, but accuracy and consistency of disposition decisions deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The system pre-establishes functional relationships between design inputs and functional conditions before disposition decisions are needed. Engineering models are prepared in advance to compute functional conditions based on design inputs, so when actual manufacturing data arrives, the system can immediately evaluate disposition without ad-hoc analysis, improving accuracy while maintaining simplicity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary computational layer consisting of engineering models and functional relationship mappings. This intermediary translates raw manufacturing data through predefined functional relationships to produce informed disposition recommendations, bridging the gap between simple historical experience and complex analytical systems.
2Reliability
If manufacturers use rapid improvised solutions for disposition decisions, then productivity is maintained, but product reliability deteriorates due to inaccurate decisions
Solution Approach 1:
Functional relationships and engineering models are established in advance during the design phase, so that when disposition decisions are needed during manufacturing, the system can rapidly compute functional conditions using pre-prepared models without time-consuming analysis, thus maintaining both speed and reliability.
Solution Approach 2:
The system transforms disposition decision-making from qualitative historical experience to quantitative functional condition computation. By changing the parameters from subjective judgment to objective computational results based on engineering models, the system achieves both rapid decision-making and improved product reliability.
3Measurement precision
If comprehensive data collection and analysis systems are implemented, then disposition accuracy is improved, but system complexity and data management burden increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts only the essential functional relationships between design inputs and functional conditions, separating them from the complete product data. By taking out only the relevant functional mappings needed for disposition decisions, the system reduces data management overhead while maintaining decision accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent segments the disposition decision system into distinct modular components: design input data, functional relationships, engineering models, and decision rules. This segmentation allows each component to be managed independently, reducing the complexity burden of comprehensive data collection while maintaining overall system accuracy.
Data Source
AI summary
A functional relationship management (FRM) system manages design, implementation and manufacture of products. The FRM system may organize and manages diverse sets of design inputs from diverse sources, computing functional conditions for each set of design inputs. Published design inputs and resulting functional conditions can be shared among several users. Each user may implement a distinct set of working design inputs, and the system can provide the resulting set of working functional conditions. When used with a variational modeling system, the FRM system can be automatically populated to identify all design inputs that affect a functional condition in a given variational model. The system also supports the ability for users to manually add models, design inputs, functional conditions, and functional relationships between the design inputs and functional conditions. The system further supports the addition of FMEA data such as failure modes. When using manufacturing data as a source of design inputs, the system can compute the as-manufactured probability of failure, and determine the as-manufactured probability of triggering failure modes.