SYSTEM REALIZATION FOR COLLABORATIVE VEHICLE WEIGHT TARGETING AND CASCADING

One of important characteristics of modern ground vehicles is the maneuverability. Excessive size and weight might result in an obstacle to impede the maneuverability of the ground vehicles. Weight should be consistently and efficiently propagated from top-level design specifications to the various subsystems and components. Furthermore, in a ground vehicle development environment, the weight targeting requires heterogeneous departments to interact with each other concurrently and collaboratively. In this paper, therefore, we propose a web-based system to support the ground vehicle weight targeting and cascading for ground vehicle engineers. The system enables weight efficiency calculation with formulae to determine weight and cost targets via competitive vehicle analyses in early product development stages. We implement the proposed system by employing the web technology, which allows collaborative information collection and sharing. With the newly introduced paradigm, the system takes into consideration the various stakeholders who need to access vehicle weight information. Via the suggested information system, vehicle weight information and efficiency metrics (or formulation) are integrated and managed for weight targeting and cascading practices, with associated information and metrics designed to be congruent with a corporation’s enterprise-wide decisions. For the purpose of the system’s validation, we implemented the system on a vehicle manufacturer’s network and discuss the test results, which were based on large-scale vehicle data.