An Infrastructure to Support Closed Loop Product Development Practice Coupled with Rapid Prototyping

This paper deals with a methodology to use rapid prototyping and tooling to aid the product development practice. Under the support of the distributive activity scheduling mechanism and the unified product data model, a closed loop is described, which consists of design-phaseoriented requirement analysis of RP/RT applications, multicriterion decision-making mechanism for selecting the combination of materials, RP method, and RP process chain, process planning for rapid prototyping and tooling, data collections from RP manufacturing, design evaluations based on manufactured prototypes, as well as case-based learning from RP process chain. Here, quality function deployment is used for quality control and assurance of such a design closed cycle. Several such closed loops during product design procedure will make the product go to a optimal solution. In addtion, concurrence and competence issues inside a closed loop design evaluation cycle are also discussed. Finally, a conclusion about this methodology is drawn.