Product architecture supporting information reuse in trailers development

In the segment of heavy transport, trailers can have a wide range of configurations depending on their application. This can vary from mining to agriculture applications, each one with its own requirements and characteristics. Therefore, companies usually configure their engineering teams according to these applications. This provides much focused knowledge about each product application; however, when looking from the whole company's viewpoint, this kind of configuration can result in barriers to share information and knowledge, as many of the products’ functions and systems can be the same. This paper presents a study of product architecture for the trailers transport sector in a Brazilian company, leader in this segment. This architecture, based on the concept of product models, provides a wide structure which can support and capture the embodiment of most products of the company. For the embodiment of the architecture developed, the UML (Unified Modeling Language) has been used. The developed architecture was defined based on the main functions and sub-functions of a trailer, and their association with main systems and sub-systems. The proposed architecture was tested in some of the product configurations commercialized by the company. Also, an evaluation of the application of this architecture in the PDM (Product Data Management) system, currently being used by the company, has been performed with good results.