Patent ID: 8583578
Filing Date: 2013-11-12
Classification: G05B,G06Q,Y02P

Abstract:
1. A design support method for creating an improvement measure for reducing a product assembling cost in a product design plan to be improved, the design support method comprising: a storage step for storing as a database, in advance by a central processing unit (CPU), assembly difficulty coefficients indicating the assembling difficulty degrees of assembling operations and attributes accompanying the assembling operations, defective assembly coefficients indicating defective assembly potential degrees of the assembling operations and the attributes accompanying the assembling operations decided according to a plurality of past design examples and data on the assembling operations/attributes and improvement guidelines collected as improvement guidelines for the assembling operations/attributes and assembling time reduction of the assembling operations/attributes and improvement guidelines for the defective assembly reduction and spread in a hierarchy while being correlated with one another, and the assembly difficulty coefficients are updated by using analysis data of assembling operations/attributes, actual measurement values of assembling time for a new product, past analysis data of assembling time for a new product, past analysis data of assembling operations/attributes and past actual measurement values of assembling time for past products; an input step for inputting, by input means, a plurality of product-constituting parts, assembling operations of the respective parts, and various attributes accompanying the assembling operations in the product design plan; a calculation step for calculating, by the CPU, a plurality of overall assembling cost affecting degree indexes indicating the affecting degrees affecting an overall assembling cost as a total of assembling costs associated with the assembling time of the product constituting parts, assembling operations of the respective parts, and attributes accompanying the assembling operations and the assembly loss cost generated by the defective assembly generation according to the assembly difficulty coefficients and the defective assembly coefficients read from the database; a selection step for selecting, by the CPU, a combination of a part, an assembling operation, and an attribute having a high overall assembling cost affecting degree index; an extraction step for automatically extracting, by the CPU, improvement guidelines to improve the selected part, the selected assembling operation, and the selected attribute from the database; an improvement guideline building step for automatically building, by the CPU, a concrete improvement guideline from the extracted improvement guidelines and the parts, the assembling operations, and the attributes associated with the extracted improvement guidelines; and a presentation step for automatically displaying, by a display, at least the built-up concrete improvement guideline on a screen.