This study proposes a methodology to analyse social networks among participating design engineers during product development projects. The proposed methodology enables product development managers or the participating design engineers to make a proper decision on product development considering the performance of participating design engineers. It considers a product development environment where an integrated product data management (PDM) system manages the product development data and associated product development processes consistently in its database, and all the design engineers share the product development data in the PDM database for their activities in the product development project. It provides a novel approach to build social networks among design engineers from an operational product development data in the PDM database without surveys or monitoring participating engineers. It automatically generates social networks among the design engineers from the product data and relationships specified by the participants during the design activities. It allows analysts to gather operational data for their analysis without additional efforts for understanding complex and unstructured product development processes. This study also provides a set of measures to evaluate the social networks. It will show the role and efficiency of each design engineers in the social network. To show the feasibility of the approach, it suggests an architecture of social network analysis (SNA) system and implemented it with a research-purpose PDM system and R, a statistical software system. A product configuration management process with synthetical example data is applied to the SNA system and it shows that the approach enables analysts to evaluate current position of design engineers in their social networks.

본 논문에서는 통합제품개발 관점에서 Computer-Aided Engineering(CAE) 활동을 지원하는 제품자료모델(Product Data Model)을 제안한다. 제안된 제품자료모델은 제품개발 프로세스를 관리하는 제품생애주기관리(Product Lifecycle Management: PLM) 시스템에 현재 독립되어 진행되고 있는 CAE 활동을 통합될 수 있도록 한다. 제안된 제품자료모델에 포함된 제품관점(Product View)은 설계와 제품구조를 공유하여 다양한 대안을 해석하고, 그 결과를 손쉽게 설계로 전달할 수 있는 독립적 CAE 활동을 보장한다. 제안된 모델을 검증하기 위하여 제품개발 프로세스와 통합된 CAE 활동을 지원하는 PLM 시제품을 개발하였다.