Charles W. Krueger SOFTWARE UPDATE NEWS ABOUT DIGITAL MANUFACTURING TOOLS AND SOFTWARE
Using PLE to Control Product Variations Manufacturing Engineering: Describe your company’s
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product line engineering [PLE] software. Is it related to prod- uct lifecycle management [PLM] software? Charles Krueger: It’s sort of an orthogonal activity to PLM. PLE began a few decades ago focused on software, and I did my PhD thesis in the area. With PLE, it’s all about managing a family of products, or a system of systems, in a way that is as effi cient as possible. The challenge with that is fi nding an effective way to take advantage of things that are common across the product line, while managing the variation. PLE brings a new approach for managing product line diversity based on features. Manufacturers can create a PLE Factory that automatically assembles and confi gures systems and software assets—such as requirements, design models, source code, BOMs, and test cases—guided by product feature profi les, to produce all products in a product line. This PLE Factory production line approach also manages how the various product features and feature combinations interact with each other, which is most often in very complex ways.
ME: How long has this PLE software existed, and how has it evolved? Krueger: It’s been around for 20–25 years, but it’s grown
and matured. What happened over time is we’ve helped companies like Lockheed Martin support product variation across the engineering lifecycle in a way that’s consistent. Imagine you have an optional feature of a product family, say in automotive, it could be a Pedestrian Detection System, where some vehicles will have it, and some won’t. PLE’s role is to understand and effi ciently manage what’s optional—I want my software and my calibrations to understand what’s
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AdvancedManufacturing.org | March 2016
Chief Executive Offi cer BigLever Software Inc. Austin, TX
www.biglever.com
optional, and that I need my PLM’s Bill of Materials to un- derstand what’s optional. So we just make a feature choice that says Pedestrian Detection System in or out. This single choice could impact thousands of places across the engi- neering lifecycle. PLE manages that, and automates the con- fi guration of assets needed to create that product instance. ME: Does this software fi t in well with the emerging prod- ucts in the Internet of Things [IoT]? Krueger: It does. While there’s some hype in the market [with IoT], it’s very relevant to what we’re doing with our cus- tomer, General Dynamics and the Army CPM [Consolidated Product Line Management] program. CPM is for building the training systems for the soldiers, so it can entail a single soldier training on a computer, like a video-game program, all the way up to a 2000-soldier, battalion-level force-on- force simulated combat in one of those courts somewhere, where they’re all laser-tagged and instrumented. If you think of the soldiers as things—they’ve all got their personal-area network that’s got all of their devices hooked up—you could
“One of the challenges in manufacturing is that we have too many parts, and our factories have to deal with too many variations.”
connect them to the larger system that’s sending signals to show simulated explosions. ME: Have you worked extensively with the military? Krueger: Absolutely. Surprisingly, one of the earliest adopters of PLE was aerospace and defense, with com- panies like Lockheed Martin in its Aegis ship program, the Navy cruise missile destroyers. Lockheed’s Aegis system started using it about seven or eight years ago, and it’s very, very successful—they’re recording about $50 million a year in cost avoidance. That’s essentially 50% of the effort, if you look at the total cost of what the engineers are doing. Work-
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