Dynamic platform modeling for concurrent product-production reconfiguration

To meet a wide range of customer needs, a variety of product concepts can be modeled employing a platform approach. Whereas frequent market changes can be accommodated by dynamically modifying product concepts in iterations, capabilities in production are seldom well incorporated as part of design iterations. In this paper, a dynamic platform modeling approach that supports concurrent product-production reconfiguration is presented. The approach builds on Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) processes and a function modeling technique is used to represent product-production variety streams inherent in a production operation model. To demonstrate the approach, a comprehensive case from the aerospace industry is presented. Conceptual representations of a set of aero engine sub-systems and a variety of welding configurations, including their inherent constraints, are mutually modeled and assessed. The results show that a set of product-production alternatives can be dynamically controlled by integrating product-production constraints using a production operation model. Following SBCE processes, inferior alternatives can be put aside until new information becomes available and a new set of alternatives can be reconfigured. The dynamics and concurrency of the approach can potentially reduce the risk of late and costly modifications that propagate from design to production

Platform Design for Producibility: Early-Stage Modeling and Assessment Support

In industry, platforms are commonly adopted to reduce unique parts among a variety of distinct product variants, which have proven to be cost-effective within a single platform lifecycle. However, when the platform becomes obsolete or modifications are required to capture changing customer and production needs and requirements, manufacturers often spill tears over the time-consuming and costly processes of reusing and adapting the current platform structure into new. In design, such a platform structure of parts is rigid and often characterized by redundant data and weak relations among and across product variants and existing production machinery. To improve the ability to reuse design and production information for assessing new concepts more quickly, non-rigid platform representations of product concepts and existing production machinery are necessary but not clarified in literature and rarely implemented in industry.\ua0In this thesis, research studies have therefore been conducted to (1) investigate how early-stage information about a variety of products and existing production machinery can be represented to improve design-production responsiveness, and (2) develop methods and tools to model and generate a set of product-production alternatives as a basis for producibility assessments. A number of engineering case studies have been prepared by researchers and industrial specialists. Data, related to product and production variety and their mutual constraining factors, have been collected by interviewing industrial specialists, as well as examining corporate documents of both product design prerequisites and capabilities in production. The engineering case studies prepared have supported the creation of new knowledge and been used to demonstrate the usefulness of the improved models, methods and tool devised supporting platform design for producibility.\ua0As opposed to rigid parts, findings show that platform entities can be represented as reusable and adaptable system objects containing early-stage information of product variety, existing production resources and processes. This information mainly consists of a common product-production structure of relations among functional requirements, design solutions, mutual constraining factors and target values. By creating a complementary producibility system, including rule-based and simulation- based models, early-stage producibility assessments of product concepts can be supported. Findings emphasize the dynamic consideration of producibility during the platform design as customer and production needs and requirements frequently change.\ua0By employing the early-stage modeling and assessment support devised, manufacturers can (1) represent product and production variety as reusable and adaptable system objects with links to producibility constraints, available over generations of products and production systems and (2) dynamically and concurrently model, generate and assess product-production alternatives under producibility constraints during early design stages as a basis for putting inferior alternatives aside until new information becomes available. Theoretically, the number of costly and time-delaying late- stage modifications of product designs, production configurations or both can be reduced. However, to validate and generalize these hypothetical effects, they need to be measured in future studies

Expanding Industrial Architecture Through Creativity in Manufacturing

Throughout the decades, industrial firms have sought clearly in calling on industry production experts to production more producible prototypes for manufacturing purposes. This can typically be accomplished by evaluating the current product production manufacturing system capabilities, and difficulties often arise due to challenges to combining product description and manufacturing operations. This paper will discuss how advances in manufacturing (as new fabrication capabilities) will add to the industrial design space for product design engineers, enabling more design flexibility and increasing efficiency by eliminating and/or loosening constraints on product designs. The findings from a series of industrial case studies provide encouraging effects on how technological technologies will positively impact the growth of industrial design engineers' solution space. The findings from a series of industrial case studies provide encouraging effects on how technological technologies will positively impact the growth of industrial design engineers' solution space. To order to foster product creativity, design managers are expected to test new technologies, new design techniques and new manufacturing (working) practices. Keywords: Industrial Design; Design for X; Design to X, Product Innovation, Manufacturing Systems, Production Innovation. DOI: 10.7176/JRDM/71-05 Publication date: November 30th 202

Design for Producibility in Fabricated Aerospace Components - A framework for predicting and controlling geometrical variation and weld quality defects during multidisciplinary design

In the aerospace industry, weight reduction has been one of the key factors in making aircraft more fuel efficient in order to satisfy environmental demands and increase competitiveness. One strategy adopted by aircraft component suppliers to reduce weight has been fabrication, in which small cast or forged parts are welded together into a final shape. Fabrication increases design freedom due to the possibility of configuring several materials and geometries, which broadens out the design space and allows multioptimization in product weight, performance quality and cost. However, with fabrication, the number of assembly steps and the complexity of the manufacturing process have increased. The use of welding has brought to the forefront important producibility problems related to geometrical variation and weld quality.The goal of this research is to analyze the current situation in industry and academia and propose methods and tools within Engineering Design and Quality Engineering to solve producibility problems involving welded high performance integrated components. The research group “Geometry Assurance and Robust Design” at Chalmers University of Technology, in which this thesis has been produced, has the objective to simulate and foresee geometrical quality problems during the early phases of the product realization process to allow the development of robust concepts and the optimization of tolerances, thus solving producibility problems. Virtual manufacturing is a key within the multidisciplinary design process of aerospace components, in which automated processes analyze broad sets of design variants to trade-off requirements among various disciplines. However, as studied in this thesis, existing methods and tools to analyze producibility do not cover all aspects that define the quality of welded structures. Furthermore, to this day, not all phenomena related to welding can be virtually modelled. Understanding causes and effects still relies on expert judgements and physical experimentation to a great deal. However, when it comes to assessing the capability of many geometrical variants, such an effort might be costly. This deficiency indicates the need for virtual assessment methods and systematic experimentation to analyze the producibility of the design variants and produce process capability data that can be reused in future projects.To fulfill that need, this thesis provides support to designers in assessing producibility by virtually and rapidly predicting the welding quality of a large number of product design variants during the multidisciplinary design space process of fabricated aerospace components.The first step has been to map the fabrication process during which producibility problems might potentially occur. The producibility conceptual model has been proposed to represent the fabrication process in order to understand how variation is originated and propagated. With this representation at hand, a number of methods have been developed and employed to provide support to: 1) Identify and 2) Measure what affects producibility; 3) Analyze the effect of the interaction between factors that affect producibility and 4)Predict producibility. These activities and methods constitute the core of the proposed Design for Producibility framework. This framework combines specialized information about welding problems (know-hows), and inspection, testing and simulation data to systematically predict and evaluate the welding producibility of a set of product design variants. Through this thesis, producibility evaluations are no longer limited to a single geometry and the study of the process parameter window. Instead, a set of geometrical variants within the design space can be analyzed. The results can be used to perform optimization and evaluate trade-offs among different disciplines during design space exploration and analysis, thus supporting the multidisciplinary design process of fabricated (welded) aerospace components

Simulation-Driven Manufacturing Planning for Product-Production Variety Coordination

Ambitious manufacturers are challenged to satisfy a broad range of customers while ensuring that the emerging product variety can be produced. Current practice suggests that products and production systems are modeled separately until the late stages of development when the designs are fixed and modifications are costly. In this paper, both product and production varieties are modeled, assessed, and evaluated using discrete-event simulation during preliminary stages. An illustrative example from the aerospace industry is used to demonstrate the approach. The simulation software Simio is used to model a sequence of operations and a set of input data related to a variety of aerospace sub-systems and a variety of welding resources. Through the simulations, the average utilization rate, the average throughput time, and the average work in process are generated. These outputs are used to evaluate the sets of product-production alternatives during the early stages of platform development when the cost to adjust the design of the products, production resources and operations are trifling

Lessons learned from the application of enhanced Function-Means modelling

Although well researched and praised in academic publications, function modelling (FM) does not\ua0have gained much traction in industrial application. To investigate into possible reasons for this,\ua0this publication researches literature of nine different projects where enhanced function-means modelling has been applied. The projects are analysed for their purpose of FM-use, applied\ua0benefits and discovered challenges of the FM approach. From this, the main challenges for FM\ua0application are the abstraction level of the modelling language as well as the lack of an interface to\ua0CAD modelling

Integrated Product and Production Platforms for Pharmaceutical Products: Design Thinking for the Development of Personalized Medicines

Treatments, when customized according to individual patient attributes, are in recent yearsreferred to as personalized medicines. Personalized medicines aim at improving the therapeutic outcome of the patient. However, current pharmaceutical production is dominatedby mass production in a batch manner, i.e. producing large volumes of identical products.Uncertainties prevail regarding the ability of current production to respond to the productcustomization need in an economically and technically realizable manner. However,without customized treatment reaching the patient the benefit of personalized medicinescannot be achieved. Hence, a mass customization-paradigm, i.e. economic feasibilitywhen designing, producing and delivering customized pharmaceutical products, is desired.Pharmaceutical product customization has been discussed from a product and productionperspective. These discussions mainly focus either on product or production design.Additionally, the economic feasibility of suggested approaches is not fully explored.Mass customization requires joint consideration of product and production system design.Hence, the aim of this thesis is to explore integrated pharmaceutical product and productionsystem design facilitating a shift toward mass customization-paradigm.Methodologies to design the integrated product and production systems of pharmaceuticalproducts supporting customization are proposed. Set-based concurrent engineering(SBCE) principles are adapted due to the ability of efficient product development.Platform-based design is adapted due to a successful approach to mass customization inmanufacturing industry. Additionally, an integrated design approach to product value assessment is proposed to emphasize the customized pharmaceutical product value.The methodology application is illustrated for oral dosage forms for the purpose of demonstrating refined approaches to integrated design of these. Knowledge regarding oral dosage forms as enablers for personalized medicines is generated.Results show that the adaption of SBCE principles enables efficient consequence analysisof pharmaceutical product designs for production system designs and is accomplished byacquiring a set-based approach to simultaneous assessment of the performance of variousdesigns. Platform-based design enables flexible pharmaceutical product and productionsystem design, thus supporting mass customization. Finally, oral dosage forms embracingmodularized designs provide substantial product design flexibility but affects manufacturingcomplexity and hence, the discussion of product and production system design cannotbe separated

Improving the management of system development to produce more affordable military avionics systems

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2003.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections."February 2003."Includes bibliographical references (p. 126-127).by Jeremy P. Tondreault.S.M

Exploring Pharmaceutical Mass Customization

The core purpose of therapeutic pharmaceutical products is to induce responses to various diseases in patients and thereby bring societal value; however, unmet medical needs currently prevail. Conventional treatment of these products predominantly embraces a one-size-fits-all design and is manufactured in a mass-production context. A mass-production context is driven by economies of scale, however, a one-size-fits-all product design challenges the satisfaction of individual patient needs. Pharmaceutical product customization thus aims to satisfy individuals’ treatment needs and thereby improve their therapeutic outcome; however, this implies a high product variety and low-volume production environment which challenges the cost-effective production with current mass-production platforms.To address this challenge of achieving the cost-effective production of customized pharmaceutical products, this thesis explores a unified approach to cost-effective design, manufacturing and supply of customized pharmaceutical products. For this purpose, the mass customization principles of product modularization, process flexibility and postponement are adopted and adapted in a pharmaceutical production context.This thesis proposes methodologies to design and model customized pharmaceutical products and production systems in a unified manner. Furthermore, customized product designs are proposed using product modularization as a design strategy and reconfigured pharmaceutical supply chain (SC) archetypes using postponement as a strategy for the cost-effective design, manufacturing and supply. The findings suggest that an increased degree of modularization in the pharmaceutical product increases the patient benefit and thus improves therapeutic patient outcomes. In addition, current mass production platforms do not display the process flexibility required for the cost-effective production of customized pharmaceutical products. Moreover, with an increased degree of postponement, opportunities for reduced production costs in the SC emerge. Finally, the cost-effective customization of pharmaceutical products requires an integrated approach of product modularization and postponement. While modeling the production system, this thesis, however, considers an SC from the manufacturer to the pharmacy and patient assessing contemporary cost-effectiveness. Future research directions should investigate societal consequences from a wider, spatial and temporal, health care system perspective