Approach To Tactical Planning For Manufacturing Innovation Projects

Rapid technological developments, shortened product life cycles, and constant competitive pressure require continuous efficiency improvements in producing material goods. Innovation is necessary to achieve these efficiency gains in manufacturing. Therefore, companies generate manufacturing innovation as part of the continuous improvement process or by absorbing external stimuli. As a result, tactical planning of innovation projects in manufacturing must be carried out regularly to enable resource planning and operative project implementation. The use of planning methods helps to increase the planning quality and reduce the complexity in the planning process. However, only a few approaches methodically support this tactical planning for manufacturing innovation. Therefore, an approach is developed using literature- and expertbased methods to systematically describe an innovation project in manufacturing, to identify and specify the relevant work contents, and finally to bring them into a defined processing sequence. In addition, the possibilities of individual planning steps being supported using tools and methods are shown. Finally, an industrial application of the approach is carried out, and a critical reflection on the results is presented. In summary, the systematic structuring of the planning process and the identification of available methods and tools improve the tactical planning of innovation projects in manufacturing

THREE DESIGN TOOL FOCUSED CASE STUDIES OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DESIGN PROJECTS

Three long term mechanical engineering design projects spanning 24 months, 12 months, and 4 months are examined in this thesis. These projects are used to explore the development of a way to represent information flow throughout the design process with respect to design tools used. This is a first step in a broader effort to formalize 1) modeling of design processes, 2) establishing case study research as a formal approach to design research, and 3) developing new design process tools. A survey of existing models compares the differences between current approaches and the limitations of each. Inspired by IDEF0, an altered process model is presented in an attempt to increase the information captured by the designer when using and constructing the process models. The name of the model is Design Enabler Information Maps (DEIM) and its requirements needed for construction are discussed in the context of the three case projects. By developing a DEIM representation for each project, this thesis explores the benefit of this approach. In constructing a DEIM of a project, design activities with no productive merit, or design process dead-ends are identified. Information that is critical to design process completion is also identified in the context of its application. Furthermore, the need of a formal tool to represent complex design processes is established. The observations drawn from this thesis lay a foundation enabling future designers to better understand, represent, modify, and complete design processes by using case studies in design research

Visualisierung biochemischer Reaktionsnetze

In dieser Arbeit werden Anforderungen an die Darstellung biochemischer Reaktionsnetze untersucht und die Netze unter dem Gesichtspunkt der Visualisierung modelliert. Anschliessend wird ein Algorithmus zum Zeichnen biochemischer Reaktionsnetze entwickelt und analysiert.In this dissertation we investigate the requirements for the visualisation of biochemical reaction networks. We compose a model for these networks that lends itself to visualisation and develop and analyse an algorithm to create drawings of the networks