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

Connecting functional and geometrical representations to support the evaluation of design alternatives for aerospace components

Novel product concepts are often down-selected in favour of the incremental development of available designs. This can be attributed to the fact that for the development of a new product, simulations and analysis based on high-fidelity CAD models are required, which are expensive to create. To solve this problem, the use of a function model (FM) as intermediate step between ideation and embodiment is suggested. The approach has been examined in a case study with an aerospace company for the development of a turbine rear assembly, using multiple workshops and interviews with practitioners from the company. A multitude of novel solutions, even extending the functionality of the legacy design, were captured. The FM approach proved to support the representation, analysis, and configuration of 102 different concepts. Although supported by the FM model, the embodiment still showed to be a bottle neck for further development. The subsequent interviews with practitioners showed that the benefits of the approach were seen, but experienced as too complex. Further work will concern a more systematic connection between the FM and CAD model, in order to automate of the embodiment process

Design space exploration of a jet engine component using a combined object model for function and geometry

The design of aircraft and engine components hinges on the use of computer aided design (CAD) models and the subsequent geometry-based analyses for evaluation of the quality of a concept. However, the generation (and variation) of CAD models to include radical or novel design solutions is a resource intense modelling effort. While approaches to automate the generation and variation of CAD models exist, they neglect the capture and representation of the product’s design rationale—what the product is supposed to do. The design space exploration approach Function and Geometry Exploration (FGE) aims to support the exploration of more functionally and geometrically different product concepts under consideration of not only geometrical, but also teleological aspects. The FGE approach has been presented and verified in a previous presentation. However, in order to contribute to engineering design practice, a design method needs to be validated through application in industrial practice. Hence, this publication reports from a study where the FGE approach has been applied by a design team of a Swedish aerospace manufacturers in a conceptual product development project. Conceptually different alternatives were identified in order to meet the expected functionality of a guide vane (GV). The FGE was introduced and applied in a series of workshops. Data was collected through participatory observation in the design teams by the researchers, as well as interviews and questionnaires. The results reveal the potential of the FGE approach as a design support to: (1) Represent and capture the design rationale and the design space; (2) capture, integrate and model novel solutions; and (3) provide support for the embodiment of novel concepts that would otherwise remain unexplored. In conclusion, the FGE method supports designers to articulate and link the design rationale, including functional requirements and alternative solutions, to geometrical features of the product concepts. The method supports the exploration of alternative solutions as well as functions. However, scalability and robustness of the generated CAD models remain subject to further research

Product-Production-CoDesign: An Approach on Integrated Product and Production Engineering Across Generations and Life Cycles

Shorter product life cycles and high product variance nowadays require efficient engineering of products and production systems. Hereby a further challenge is that costs over the entire life cycle of the product and production system are defined early in the process. Existing approaches in literature and practice such as simultaneous engineering and design for manufacturing incorporate aspects of production into product engineering. However, these approaches leave potential for increasing efficiency unused because knowledge from past generations of products, production systems, and business models is not stored and reused in a formalized way and future generations are not considered in the respective current engineering process. This article proposes an approach for integrated product and production engineering across generations and life cycles of products and production systems. This includes the consideration of related business models to successfully establish the products on the market as well as the anticipation of future product and production system characteristics. The presented approach can reduce both development and manufacturing costs as well as time to market and opens the vast technological potential for product design to achieve additional customer benefits. Three case studies elaborate on aspects of the proposed approach and present its benefits

Cost-efficient digital twins for design space exploration: A modular platform approach

The industrial need to predict the behaviour of radically new products brings renewed interest in how to set up and make use of physical prototypes and testing. However, conducting physical testing of a large number of radical concepts is still a costly approach. This paper proposes an approach to actively use digital twins in the early phases where the design can be largely changed. The approach is based on creating a set of digital twin modules that can be reused and recomposed to create digital twin variants. However, this paper considers that developing a digital twin can be very costly. Therefore, the approach focuses on supporting the decisions about the optimal mix of modules, and about whether a new digital twin module should be developed. The approach is applied to an industrial case derived from the collaboration with two space manufacturers. The results highlight how the design of the modular platform has an impact on the cost of the digital twin, if commonality and reusability aspects are considered. These results point at the cost-efficiency of applying a modular approach to digital twin creation, as a means to reuse the results from physical testing to validate new designs and their ranges of validit

Cost-efficient digital twins for design space exploration: A modular platform approach

The industrial need to predict the behaviour of radically new products brings renewed interest in how to set up and make use of physical prototypes and testing. However, conducting physical testing of a large number of radical concepts is still a costly approach. This paper proposes an approach to actively use digital twins in the early phases where the design can be largely changed. The approach is based on creating a set of digital twin modules that can be reused and recomposed to create digital twin variants. However, this paper considers that developing a digital twin can be very costly. Therefore, the approach focuses on supporting the decisions about the optimal mix of modules, and about whether a new digital twin module should be developed. The approach is applied to an industrial case derived from the collaboration with two space manufacturers. The results highlight how the design of the modular platform has an impact on the cost of the digital twin, if commonality and reusability aspects are considered. These results point at the cost-efficiency of applying a modular approach to digital twin creation, as a means to reuse the results from physical testing to validate new designs and their ranges of validit

Assessing the value of radical technology alternatives at system level

This study investigates the challenge to assess value when alternative technologies - of radical nature - are integrated on complex products. The study highlights three main challenges: 1) value depends on how the overall product platform is impacted over time 2) value depends on combination effects between technologies and 3) value depends on how the technology balances internal and external stakeholders needs simultaneously. The paper describes how these challenges can be tackled by novel modelling methods, illustrated with an example related to structural batteries

Trading Off between Flexibility and Product Platform Constraints for Effective Technology Introduction

Developing product platforms is an established method of reducing internal variety costs while delivering variety to customers. \ua0A critical aspect of a platform, that is expected to be used and extended for many years, is the ability to introduce new technologies and solutions effectively. Since these technological integration endeavours may challenge platform constraints, it is necessary to be able to assess the trade-off between their expected value and cost of realisation. New technologies can be integrated more easily into products derived from product platforms if they are flexible. However, introducing flexibility early can be wasteful, both in terms of resources used for the development of the platforms and the suboptimal design of products derived from the platform. In this study, a review of the existing literature is conducted and several case studies in the automotive sector are performed. Both technical and organizational factors are found to limit platform flexibility. This research supports the idea that the flexibility to integrate technology into existing platforms is a valuable property. Consequently, it is important to foster the ability to more objectively assess the value of proposed technology changes in organisations relying on product and production platforms.Finally, this thesis proposes a model-based methodology to trade off the flexibility of a product platform with the lifetime value it can deliver to its stakeholders. The methodology utilizes technology roadmaps, architectural modelling, value-driven design, and model-based simulations to establish the bandwidth of a product platform. As such, the constraints that the platform introduces for future derived products are balanced against valuable flexibility, which is defined as the flexibility of the platform to allow for more alternative designs, including using new technologies, of higher value in future products. The findings of this thesis have implications for the research of product platforms and their development, as well as for practitioners making decisions about product platforms with consideration to the uncertainty around the ways they will be used and upgraded in the future

Applying lean principles and set-based approaches in product development

The research described in this thesis addresses the problem of transformation to lean product development (LPD) and how to introduce and support the use of set-based design (SBD) in the concept development process. The original description of SBD does not define how to generate, evaluate and reduce a set of design solutions. Evaluation of solution candidates, which are too complex to be analytically verified, or are driven by qualitative criteria, has here been given special attention, particularly in cases when methods utilising human judgment may be needed. For some products, the solution space can consist of both principally different alternatives and parameterised variants of these. The question here is if established methods can be combined and introduced in an efficient way to support an SBD process for development of such products, when driven by both quantitative and qualitative criteria.The research approaches used are:-\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0 a two-case study (Yin, 2009), -\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0 the design research methodology (Blessing and Chakrabarti, 2009), and -\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0\ua0 the scientific work paradigm (J\uf8rgensen, 1992), the last two combined with multiple case studies. Also, elements of action research (Oosthuizen, 2002) are used. The results show that the principles and introduction of LPD were experienced as positive by participating practitioners in the conducted case studies. It was furthermore shown that SBD can be introduced and applied in a workshop at team level within a time frame of one or two working days if the design problem at hand is not too complex. Another result is that SBD can be combined with and supported by established methods such as creative and systematic methods for synthesis, enhanced function-means modelling, axiomatic design, extended causal diagrammes, interactive evolutionary algorithms (IEA) and Pugh matrices for generation, analysis, evaluation and reduction of a solution space of design alternatives and variants of these. Both qualitative and quantitative requirements can be handled. The conclusions are that a transformation to LPD is facilitated by information about good examples and internal support by management. Also, the existence of a lean enthusiast in the organization and an appropriate implementation plan supports a transformation to LPD. A function to maintain the LPD system as well as influence of the lean principles are valuable guides on how to use LPD.\ua0 Also concluded is that a seamless, efficient process, applying set-based principles, for synthesis, evaluation, and reduction of a solution space of design alternatives can be created by combining enhanced function-means modelling, morphological matrices, axiomatic design, causal diagrammes and Pugh matrices. Such a compound of methods can be introduced and applied in a workshop at team level within a time frame of one to two days when solving well-known and not too complex design problems. The workshop should be facilitated by an expert on the methods used and initiated and surveyed by a team manager. Furthermore, a solution space of parameterised design variants, with criteria that are either qualitative or too complicated to be numerically defined, can be generated, evaluated and reduced in such a process. By using a defined set of functional and constraining criteria, and applying axiomatic design and IEA, a variant solution space can be generated and refined. A set-up of the IEA that does not overburden the user should be preferred