2007 Frontiers in Design & Simulation Workshop

Wednesday, May 16, 2007.
(with social event on Tuesday evening after the CPDA workshop)
Georgia Institute of Technology Campus
Atlanta, GA

Speaker: Ravi Rangan

Chief Technology Officer, Centric Software, Inc.

Bio:
Dr. Ravi Rangan brings real-world PLM implementation experience in enterprise scale product structure / configuration management, search-based applications and process-driven system integration/design automation in the automotive, aerospace, high technology and medical device industries. Ravi Rangan was the CTO of Product Sight Corporation, a company he co-founded to address process-aware product lifecycle applications for the PLM market. He previously served as a WW Corporate Director for SDRC's ExperTeam program (now UGS), and worked as the Founding Technical Director of SDRC's Enterprise Solution Center and on-site Metaphase solution architect with The Boeing Company's "Define and Control Aircraft Configuration/ Manufacturing Resource Management (DCAC/MRM) Program", consulting with various business process/ IT architecture teams and providing leadership to the architecture, design, and implementation phases of the program. He has published extensively, organized symposia, panels and tutorials in the areas of business process modeling, systems architecture, design automation, and information/ knowledge management. He serves on the Exec. Steering Committee of ASME CIE Division, and is a founding member of the ASME's JCISE editorial board, and a reviewer for several journals. Ravi completed his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (specializing in engineering information management) from Georgia Tech. in 1990.

Talk: Multi-discipline Program Office and Functional Integration - Challenges and Solutions

A fundamental problem relative to systems engineering and multi-disciplinary design processes in product development organizations is the need to work at different levels of abstraction and representations to achieve specific goals, while integrating decisions in the context of the overall project or program. Of particular interest are unifying use cases dealing with allocation and traceability between requirements, functional and logical design and physical design, and the more pragmatic program management tasks of tracking the progress of the overall program. This is compounded when product complexity is high, and each domain requires process autonomy for its specialists and sophisticated representation semantics to capture their information. While this problem is manageable when all the data is managed within one system, it becomes daunting when sophisticated use case support is required for data that is spread across different types of commercial applications and information systems. This presentation will explore Centric's unique approach and explore two key use cases in detail: one dealing with Program Office visibility and tracking relative to complex, multi-disciplinary programs, and the second dealing with functional integration across multiple disciplines and domains for complex systems. A common theme is to provide solutions that work in the context of disparate applications systems, while addressing capabilities for the unifying use cases at appropriate levels of abstraction. We will also review common patterns that are exhibited in such situations, and discuss how our unique approach addresses common concerns such as the need for rapid deployment and adoption, provision for customer specific variability, co-existence with customer investments in existing systems, data and processes and long-term cost of ownership considerations.