A REVIEW OF COMPUTER-AIDED SIMULTANEOUS ENGINEERING SYSTEMS

World-wide markets are becoming increasingly competitive, and in order to sustain market share organisations are developing a customer-oriented approach for designing and producing high-quality, high-value products. The philosophy of simultaneous engineering has been proposed as a potential means of improving product development practice. This philosophy involves simultaneously satisfying the functionality, reliability, manufacturability, and marketability concerns of new products in order to reduce product development time and cost, and to achieve higher product quality and value. In this paper the concept, objectives and principles of simultaneous engineering are introduced. The past and present research into computer-aided systems for the support of simultaneous engineering is present, reviewed and classified. This will both allow the current state of the art to be assessed, and enable the identification of future research that will contribute to the realisation of computer aided support for Simultaneous Engineering.