Читать книгу Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing - Zhuming Bi - Страница 29

The concern on the discipline‐oriented curricula has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. A number of educational programmes were proposed and implemented to address this issue. For example, the Engage Program sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) aimed to increase the capacity of engineering institutions to retain undergraduate students by facilitating the implementation of three research‐based strategies, i.e. (i) improve faculty–student interaction, (ii) improve spatial visualization skill, and (iii) use everyday examples in engineering teaching, to improve educational experiences (Nilsson 2014; Bi and Mueller 2016).

To adapt the rapid advancement of CATs, this books proposes to improve existing discipline‐oriented engineering programmes, at least for some upper‐level engineering courses. The objective is to develop a new course framework where constitutive elements are not varied with an increase of computer aided tools or the diversification of sub‐disciplines.

The design of an engineering course curriculum is similar to the design of any engineering system in the sense that the complexity and dynamic characteristics become two critical factors to deal with when the system is continuously evolving. The modularity concept has proved to be an effective way to deal with system complexity and dynamic characteristics (Bi et al. 2008). In the similar way, the modularity concept is proposed to deal with the misalignment of discipline‐oriented curricula and a large variety of computer aided software tools in manufacturing engineering.

Figure 1.22 shows an alternative to the discipline‐oriented curriculum. It can be referred to as a 4‐P engineering curriculum since the manufacturing fundamental is differentiated for Product, Process, Production, and Platform, respectively, for the required system functionalities in a product lifecycle. The objective of the proposed curriculum is to minimize the impact of the ever‐increasing complexity of the system as well as computer aided tools. Since any manufactured product has its own lifecycle, a taxonomy of engineering courses based on the product lifecycle can sustain its consistence, even though the scope of a manufacturing system or computer aided tools may vary with respect to time.

Following the axiomatic theory (Cochran et al. 2016a, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b), the high‐level functionalities for the product, process, production, and platform can be further decomposed as a modularized structure. Take an example the functional requirements (FRs) for a product design, FRs have been decomposed further into the designs of geometries, motions, product families, and a sustainable design related to the product life cycle. The granularity of the functionalities can be appropriate to match the functionalities for well‐established engineering sub‐disciplines as well as available computer aided tools. Due to the modularized structure, the proposed framework has the flexibility to customize the selection of sub‐disciplines and corresponding computer aided tools in a specific engineering curriculum.

Figure 1.22 Proposed course framework for digital manufacturing.