The Effect of Incorporating End-User Customization into Additive Manufacturing Designs

In the realm of additive manufacturing there is an increasing trend among makers to create designs that allow for end-users to alter them prior to printing an artifact. Online design repositories have tools that facilitate the creation of such artifacts. There are currently no rules for how to create a good customizable design or a way to measure the degree of customization within a design. This work defines three types of customizations found in additive manufacturing and presents three metrics to measure the degree of customization within designs based on the three types of customization. The goal of this work is to ultimately provide a consistent basis for which a customizable design can be evaluated in order to assist makers in the creation of new customizable designs that can better serve end-user. The types of customization were defined by doing a search of Thingiverse’s online data base of customizable designs and evaluating commonalities between designs. The three types of customization defined by this work are surface, structure, and personal customization. The associated metrics are used to quantify the adjustability of a set of online designs which are then plot against the daily use rate and each other on separate graphs. The use rate data used in this study is naturally biased towards hobbyists due to where the designs used to create the data resides. A preliminary analysis is done on the metrics to evaluate their correlation with design use rate as well as the dependency of the metrics in relation to each other. The trends between the metrics are examined for an idea of how best to provide customizable designs. This work provides a basis for measuring the degree of customization within additive manufacturing design and provides an initial framework for evaluating the usability of designs based on the measured degree of customization relative to the three types of defined customizations

Customization of buildings using configuration systems - a study of conditions and opportunities in the Swedish timber house manufacturing industry

The aim of this project has been to study timber house manufacturers and provide guidance to those who aim to increase efficiency through the adaption of product modeling and eventually configuration. The findings in this report are based on a series of case studies within the abovementioned industry, which serves as a basis for the analysis and recommendations given. The Swedish timber house manufacturing industry has a long tradition of producing houses in factories. In recent years, however, the construction industry has received criticisms for issues with quality and productivity, problems that is also valid for the timber house manufacturers. During the upswing in the past decade, IT investments in the industry have not kept the same pace as other investments. For this reason IT environments are currently growing out of date, which is one reason contributing to today’s problems. In many ways the timber house manufacturers resembles traditional on-site construction, especially in how they use IT and product documentation. Given the different conditions in the industries and the fact that timber house manufacturers can assimilate influences from other manufacturing industries, this presents an interesting opportunity to pursue for the industry. The results from the case studies show that companies have a potential to better integrate processes, use IT and manage product documentation. How timber house manufacturers view themselves also affects how they treat questions regarding abovementioned areas, which ultimately also affects how well they will be able to use configuration. Whether they see themselves as a construction company, an engineering firm or a manufacturing industry will have an effect on many aspects of how to run the business. The findings show that the timber house manufacturing companies has a potential in streamlining and standardizing product documentation to facilitate configuration and improving the product specification process. Companies should address three areas as a part of the change: processes, IT and product documentation. When considering these three areas together, companies have an opportunity to increase their competitiveness through more efficient processes and standardized product families. Clearly there are risks associated with introducing new IT systems and changing processes. Companies need to consider the risks and potential benefits with pursuing this path. Risks that should be included in an evaluation are for example; changes in the market, costs and quantifiable benefits from using configuration. The report provides a number of advices to the timber house manufacturers that might be useful to consider for companies that wishes to go forward with product modeling and configuration. For example, it is recommended that companies investigate how to define the roles and responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer, explore how the IT-strategy best delivers value to the business and consider to introduce a product development process

Mapping mass customization

Mass customization (MC) and personal fabrication (PF) are current relevant topics in architecture offices practice and schools design research. Architects are adopting information based design and production techniques as a response to architectural century challenges. However, is not clear how various authors used and transformed the concept in practice, research and industry after three decades since the MC term was introduced by Davis (1987). Therefore, is essential to map the most relevant works in the field in relation to production and design control. The paper presents some of the results of the ongoing study through an evolving map that aims to visualize relationships, layering complexity and revealing difference.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Inhibited freedom: A digital endeavour framed by randomness

For millennia, humans have created objects using a myriad of materials, tools, and more recently, machinery. Each industrial revolution contributes to the enrichment of production techniques and adds to an already vast repertoire of materials and manufacturing methods. The creative industry continues embracing the changes, experimenting with new technology, evolving the practice, and producing novel work. During the last decades, the creative industry has almost entirely shifted, either partially or completely, from analogue to digital. This study focuses on the creation of objects by applying digital tools across all development faces, from the form finding process to the fabrication. The process utilizes algorithms designed to generate infinite iterations of semi-controlled forms enlivened by the unexpected nature of randomness, producing a collection of objects of similar aesthetic properties while remaining individually unique in form

Designing precise and flexible graphical modelling languages for software development

Model-driven approaches to software development involve building computerized models of software and the environment in which it is intended to operate. This thesis offers a selection of the author’s work over the last three decades that addresses the design of precise and flexible graphical modelling languages for use in model-driven software development. The primary contributions of this work are: • Syntropy: the first published object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) method to fully integrate formal and graphical modelling techniques. • The creation of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and its integration into the Unified Modeling Language (UML) specification. • The identification of requirements and mechanisms for increasing the flexibility of the UML specification. • The design and implementation of tools for implementing graphical Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). The starting point was the author’s experience with formal specification techniques contrasted with the lack of precision of published object-oriented analysis and design methods. This led to a desire to fully integrate these two topics – formal specification and object-orientation - into a coherent discipline. The Syntropy approach, created in 1994 by this author and John Daniels, was the first published complete attempt to do this. Much of the author’s subsequent published work concerns the Unified Modeling Language (UML). UML represented a welcome unification of earlier OOAD approaches, but suffered badly from inflexibility and lack of precision. A significant part of the work included in this thesis addresses the drawbacks of the UML and proposes improvements to the precision of its definition, including through the invention of Object Constraint Language (OCL) and its incorporation into the UML specification, and the consideration of UML as source material for the definition of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Several of the author’s published works in this thesis concern mechanisms for the creation of DSLs, both within a UML framework and separately

Mass Production Processes

It is always hard to set manufacturing systems to produce large quantities of standardized parts. Controlling these mass production lines needs deep knowledge, hard experience, and the required related tools as well. The use of modern methods and techniques to produce a large quantity of products within productive manufacturing processes provides improvements in manufacturing costs and product quality. In order to serve these purposes, this book aims to reflect on the advanced manufacturing systems of different alloys in production with related components and automation technologies. Additionally, it focuses on mass production processes designed according to Industry 4.0 considering different kinds of quality and improvement works in mass production systems for high productive and sustainable manufacturing. This book may be interesting to researchers, industrial employees, or any other partners who work for better quality manufacturing at any stage of the mass production processes