Product-Service Systems for Functional Offering of Automotive Fixtures: Using Design Automation as Enabler

In production of automotive components, control-measuring is an important activity to assure that geometries meet expected tolerances. This is done via randomly taking parts out of production for control-measuring in a fixture. This fixture is both a tedious and repetitive product to design and configure. The aim of this paper is therefore to present an approach to adopt a design automation strategy towards supporting the configuration of fixtures and to discuss opportunities for moving towards a Product-Service System-paradigm in this domain. This paper reports on a development of a design automation demonstrator to configure fixtures for control-measuring. The demonstrator has been developed in a commercial CAD-environment and will be deployed through a web-based interface. The paper concludes with a discussion on PSS-opportunities and how to drive this with a Knowledge-Based Engineering-modelling approach.