Understanding the relationship between design margins and trade-offs

To achieve an objective designers often need to make trade-offs between multiple parameters. In incremental design or during the design process an additional objective is often to minimise the changes they need to make to meet the objective. This is in particular an issue for systems with product platforms, over individual components are over-designed. This paper argues that designers can think about this problem in terms of the margins on the objective parameters as well as the parameters that are traded-off. This is illustrated with the case study of an engineering cooling system

The reality of design process planning

Most companies struggle with the efficiency of their processes. One contributory factor is the lack of efficient process planning. This paper describes current planning practise in industry, which uses a multitude of different plans in parallel. The units of planning and their resulting plans roughly fall into product plans considering cost, bill of material and procurement considerations; process plans including different milestone, task and activity plans and quality plans. This paper maps out the ownership of these plans, and establishes that organisations work because individuals use more then one plan and have a tacit understanding of the relationships between these plans. The lack of effective plans affects the company through a lack of understanding of process connectivity and in consequence bad communication

Strategic, tactical decisions and information in Rapid Manufacturing supply chain

The efficiency and agility of its supply chain is vital to the commercial success of any product. Sharing strategic and tactical information effectively within the supply chain is often a key factor in achieving this goal. This paper proposes a framework to identify strategic, tactical decisions and information. The framework is used to conduct a sector based analysis of the Rapid Manufacturing (RM) industry. The decisions and information identified include amongst others various supply chain strategies and technical information

The spiral of applied research: A methodological view on integrated design research

Abstract not available

Towards a change process planning tool

The relationship between a product and its design process is generally complex and not fully understood. When modifying a product, industry still rarely considers the implementation process and its consequences for other design activities in the company, which is hard to assess with conventional planning methods. Although change processes are highly constrained, product and process constraints are not usually considered together or traded off against each other when planning the change. Inadequate assessment and planning of the change implementation process can lead to costly knock-on effects across the product and the design process. This paper argues for a combination of change and process research and discusses requirements for a change process planning tool. It proposes a system for the analysis of the impact of change on the product as well as other company activities. Then, a more informed selection between change alternatives is possible

Model granularity and related concepts

Models are integral to engineering design and basis for many decisions. Therefore, it is necessary to comprehend how a model’s properties might influence its behaviour. Model granularity is an important property but has so far only received limited attention. The terminology used to describe granularity and related phenomena varies and pertinent concepts are distributed across communities. This article positions granularity in the theoretical background of models, collects formal definitions for relevant terms from a range of communities and discusses the implications for engineering design

Parameter trails

Successful communication is vital for the success of any design project. However, communication often fails, adversely affecting design process efficiency and product quality.understand the connections between different aspects of design and don–t know where to find out more information or who to talk to. This paper presents a new model, developed from current project planning techniques, which supports communication using parameter-specific data. It enables designers to question information, inform their colleagues pro-actively and assess the impact of changing parameter values on subsequent design tasks. Such interaction is critical in allowing designers to see how their own tasks fit into the overall product design

The turbulent pressure support in galaxy clusters revisited

Due to their late formation in cosmic history, clusters of galaxies are not fully in hydrostatic equilibrium and the gravitational pull of their mass at a given radius is expected not to be entirely balanced by the thermal gas pressure. Turbulence may supply additional pressure, and recent (X-ray and SZ) hydrostatic mass reconstructions claim a pressure support of $\sim 5-15\%$ of the total pressure at $R_{\rm 200}$. In this work we show that, after carefully disentangling bulk from small-scale turbulent motions in high-resolution simulations of galaxy clusters, we can constrain which fraction of the gas kinetic energy effectively provides pressure support in the cluster's gravitational potential. While the ubiquitous presence of radial inflows in the cluster can lead to significant bias in the estimate of the non-thermal pressure support, we report that only a part of this energy effectively acts as a source of pressure, providing a support of the order of $\sim 10\%$ of the total pressure at $R_{\rm 200}$.Comment: 5 pages, 5 pages, accepted, to appear in MNRAS Letter

A functional analysis of change propagation

A thorough understanding of change propagation is fundamental to effective change management during product redesign. A new model of change propagation, as a result of the interaction of form and function is presented and used to develop an analysis method that determines how change is likely to propagate. The analysis produces a Design Structure Matrix, which clearly illustrates change propagation paths and highlights connections that could otherwise be ignored. This provides the user with an in-depth knowledge of product connectivity, which has the potential to support the design process and reduce the product's susceptibility to future change

A holistic phylogeny of the coronin gene family reveals an ancient origin of the tandem-coronin, defines a new subfamily, and predicts protein function.

BACKGROUND: Coronins belong to the superfamily of the eukaryotic-specific WD40-repeat proteins and play a role in several actin-dependent processes like cytokinesis, cell motility, phagocytosis, and vesicular trafficking. Two major types of coronins are known: First, the short coronins consisting of an N-terminal coronin domain, a unique region and a short coiled-coil region, and secondly the tandem coronins comprising two coronin domains. RESULTS: 723 coronin proteins from 358 species have been identified by analyzing the whole-genome assemblies of all available sequenced eukaryotes (March 2011). The organisms analyzed represent most eukaryotic kingdoms but also cover every taxon several times to provide a better statistical sampling. The phylogenetic tree of the coronin domains based on the Bayesian method is in accordance with the most recent grouping of the major kingdoms of the eukaryotes and also with the grouping of more recently separated branches. Based on this "holistic" approach the coronins group into four classes: class-1 (Type I) and class-2 (Type II) are metazoan/choanoflagellate specific classes, class-3 contains the tandem-coronins (Type III), and the new class-4 represents the coronins fused to villin (Type IV). Short coronins from non-metazoans are equally related to class-1 and class-2 coronins and thus remain unclassified. CONCLUSIONS: The coronin class distribution suggests that the last common eukaryotic ancestor possessed a single and a tandem-coronin, and most probably a class-4 coronin of which homologs have been identified in Excavata and Opisthokonts although most of these species subsequently lost the class-4 homolog. The most ancient short coronin already contained the trimerization motif in the coiled-coil domain