Safety Considerations in Optimal Automotive Vehicle Design.

While automobiles provide society with an unprecedented amount of mobility, motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of injury and death worldwide. Designing safer vehicles is a priority of governments and automakers alike; however, other requirements such as increased fuel economy and performance have driven designs in conflicting directions. Because society benefits from reductions in traffic injuries and fuel consumption, governments impose standards and incentives for safer and more fuel efficient vehicles. One form of incentive is a consumer-information test, such as a New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), using standardized crash tests in various impact directions to help customers compare the crashworthiness of different automobiles. Automakers strive to perform well on these tests by optimizing vehicle designs to the specified scenarios. Another type of standard uses injury thresholds to ensure a minimum level of protection, such as the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the U.S. Army ground vehicle blast protection criteria. This dissertation uses these standards to examine the impact of safety optimization formulations and tradeoffs on vehicle design and competing objectives. Physics-based modeling is used to simulate crash or blast events, and computational designs of experiments are conducted with the resulting data fit to response surfaces. Single- and multi-objective optimization formulations are developed to demonstrate relationships between occupant protection and vehicle weight for civilian vehicle crashes and military vehicle blast events. Using these formulations, the civilian case study is extended to understand the impact of the frontal NCAP test speed on injuries in frontal on-road crashes, as well as the effect safety considerations have on manufacturer profit-maximizing decisions and consumer behavior in a competitive market. The military case study is also expanded to demonstrate how high vehicle weight and fuel consumption increase the need for convoys, posing additional injury risks to personnel and thereby making fuel economy a safety objective in a casualty-minimization formulation. The results of these studies demonstrate the need for designers and engineers to consider safety in new, more holistic ways, and this dissertation establishes a new type of design thinking that can contribute to decreased vehicle-related injuries while also accounting for other objectives.Ph.D.Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91402/1/shoffens_1.pd

Organisational sustainability readiness: a model and assessment tool for manufacturing companies

Manufacturing plays a major role in the economic and social development of society, yet this often comes at a high environmental cost. Despite great advances in our understanding of sustainability issues and solutions developed to tackle this challenge, current production and consumption models are still largely unsustainable. Strong industrial actions are required to move towards safer and cleaner practices respectful of the planetary boundaries. This paper puts forward a novel approach for top and middle management in manufacturing companies to build capabilities for sustainable manufacturing by assessing their organisational sustainability readiness. The proposed model and tool for organisational sustainability readiness were developed based on themes emerging from empirical data collected via interviews and focus groups in six companies. The resulting themes were consolidated and validated with relevant literature to create four levels of readiness, displaying a crescendo of operations management practices on the shop floor that positively affect sustainability performance. Finally, an industrial application was used to further validate the tool and demonstrate how it can help companies develop a roadmap for a more sustainable manufacturing industry

Transforming brand core values into perceived quality: A Volvo case study

Core values are an important part of Volvo Car Group’s and Volvo Trucks’ strategic development plans. These two companies share the same core values, quality, safety, and environmental care, but they approach these values in different ways. This study seeks to understand how industry professionals and customers perceive these core values and the attributes that are associated with them, using semi-structured interviews with industry professionals from both companies and quantitative survey methods with customers. The purposes of this study are to investigate how designers convey core values to customers through product attributes and how customers perceive those core values through the same attributes. Such an understanding reveals the commonalities and discrepancies between the perspectives of producers and customers, and can contribute to more effective design processes that communicate company values in the early product development phases

Sustainability in a changing world: integrating human health and wellbeing, urbanisation, and ecosystem services

There is an urgent need to address interlinked sustainability issues in a world challenged by inequality, finite resources and unprecedented changes across Earth’s systems. As Future Earth Fellows, based on our collective expertise in a diverse range of sustainability issues, here we identify a specific need to recognise and respond appropriately to the nexus between human health and wellbeing, urbanisation, and ecosystem services (the ‘WUE nexus’). This nexus is a priority area for research, policy and practice. In particular, it provides a useful pathway to meet the challenges of successful implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this brief, we present the following policy recommendations:1. By emphasising urban-rural linkages, foster an integrated approach to ensure food security, food safety, and health promotion;2. Secure resilient livelihoods for all, in particular for vulnerable groups; and3. Integrate co-production of knowledge in science for decision-making, including the co-design of implementation frameworks, and the adoption of a nexus approach.<br/

Policy and demand as drivers for product quality and sustainability: A market systems approach

The market is a complex system with many different stakeholders and interactions. A number of decisions within this system affect the design of new products, not only from design teams but also from consumers, producers, and policy-makers. Market systems studies have shown how profit-optimal producer decisions regarding product design and pricing can influence a number of different factors including the quality, environmental impact, production costs, and ultimately consumer demand for the product. This study models the ways that policies and consumer demand combine in a market systems framework to influence optimal product design and, in particular, product quality and environmental sustainability. Implementing this model for the design of a mobile phone case shows how different environmental impact assessment methods, levels of taxation, and factors introduced to the consumer decision-making process will influence producer profits and overall environmental impacts. This demonstrates how different types of policies might be evaluated for their effectiveness in achieving economic success for the producer and reduced environmental impacts for society, and a "win-win" scenario was uncovered in the case of the mobile phone

Systems thinking in tolerance and quality-related design decision-making

This paper describes a new approach for using systems thinking in the context of design decisions that affect product quality. Such decisions include dimensional tolerances, material choice, and product geometry, which are shown to have links with product quality and performance, profitability, sustainability consequences, and resulting market and governance changes. These links are presented in a systems model that maps the drivers and consequences of these quality-related decisions, ultimately showing that design decisions influence future design decisions based on the sustainability-related outcomes of the resulting products. The systems model is then used in a design scenario of a mobile phone, where important information about the consequences of the product is gleaned by using the proposed model

Comparing Standards and Policies for Sustainability in Tolerance Optimization

Design for sustainability often considers three potentially competing objectives in economic, ecological, and social sustainability. In general, business success hinges on economic sustainability, while ecological and social concerns are treated as secondary objectives for marketing or political purposes. Previous research has shown that there is a tradeoff among these sustainability objectives regarding design decisions that include tolerances and material choices, and different market- or policy-driven incentives may result in different optimal design decisions. This study presents and demonstrates an approach for evaluating legislative opportunities that may internalize ecological and social objectives into the economic objectives of product-developing firms, using the case study of an automotive body panel. Modeling and simulation tools from Computer Aided Tolerancing (CAT), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), and design optimization are combined using a novel framework to show how sustainability-driven government policies such as taxation may influence design decisions and sustainability outcomes

Taxation and Transparency: How Policy Decisions Impact Product Quality and Sustainability

Product markets can be modeled as complex systems that account for a diverse set of stakeholders and interactions. Decisions by all of the stakeholders in these systems can affect the design of new products, not only from design teams but also from consumers, producers, and policymakers. Studies of market systems have shown how producers can make profit-optimal decisions on product design and pricing, and how those decisions influence a number of different factors including the quality, environmental impact, production costs, and ultimately consumer demand for the product. This study presents and demonstrates the use of a framework for modeling the ways that policies and consumer demand influence optimal product design and, in particular, product quality and environmental sustainability. Employing this model for the tolerance and material design decisions for a mobile phone case shows how different environmental impact scales, taxation levels, and information available to consumers will influence producer profits and overall environmental impacts. This demonstrates how different policies can be evaluated for their impacts on economic success for producers and reduced environmental impacts for society, and a "win-win" scenario is found for the mobile phone case

Exploring systemic forces that influence sustainable design transitions

In this research some systemic forces to sustainable design are described and mapped out, along with key areas, dimensions and stakeholders. These results are visualized in a causal loop diagram (CLD), which was the outcome of a group model building approach supported by a literature review. Within the proposed system model, represented by the system-level variables and their relationships within the CLD, some potential leverage points that can help make product design better contribute to sustainability are identified and described. These can be found in the balancing and reinforcing feedback loops of the CLD as well as the mapping to societal dimensions of sustainability transitions and stakeholder groups. Among the stakeholder groups, business managers, scientific researchers and engineering designers can be tied to the design community. Future research is proposed to build on these initial results to deepen the knowledge about the systemic drivers and barriers and leverage the contribution of design practice to sustainable development. © ICED 2021.All right reserved.open access</p

A Multi-objective Tolerance Optimization Approach for Economic, Ecological, and Social Sustainability

Sustainable design requires simultaneous consideration of the economic, ecological, and social consequences of design decisions. The selection of dimensional tolerances and materials are two such decisions that have impacts in all three of these areas. This article presents an optimization framework along with generalized models for considering sustainability and understanding how different aspects of sustainability may trade off with one another. A mobile phone design is used as a case study to demonstrate the strengths of the approach when varying manufacturing tolerance and material choice, and the results include three-dimensional Pareto frontiers illustrating the design tradeoffs