In this paper, a software tool for the automated assessment of parts to be manufactured by sheet metal forming is considered as a starting point for a boundary object for cross disciplinary communication in manufacturing companies. The tool is based on automated FEA calculations in CAD models allowing the quick verification of the manufacturability of sheet metal parts checking that they can be manufactured without failure of the material. The paper proposes to derive a boundary object from the data and information pertaining to the tool and manage it in a proposed structure in an item centered PLM system. In this way up to date information can be communicated in a format that can be understood by several different disciplines, possibly reducing the risk of errors in the design process and when carrying out changes. A suggestion of how to manage the data and information in the PLM system of the industrial manufacturing company is made and is discussed in this paper.

To achieve relevant research results, collaborative research is deemed essential in several engineering and management disciplines. When the addressed research questions are associated with larger societal challenges the need for collaboration between various actors and disciplines becomes even more urgent. In this paper, the development of a transdisciplinary research initiative aiming at supporting long-term ability for the manufacturing industry to succeed with the green transition, is described. The transdisciplinary research programme ´GRACE - Green acceleration through integrated and platform-enabled product realisation´ is an eight-year project (4+4 years), involving eleven manufacturing industries and four industrial networks. The research programme GRACE is the result of a close collaboration between industrial partners and academic researcher for almost one year. We have through workshops and various meetings jointly formulated a research agenda, based on eight research issues: (1) requirement specification and management, (2) platform principles and lifecycle strategies on different system levels, (3,4) product design and production solutions supporting circular strategies, (5,6) product and production information management, (7) shared understanding and visions, and (8) knowledge integration, operationalisation and implementation. Based on these research issues, and the priorities among the industrial partners, three initial research projects have been developed. The development of the research programme applied a co-production process, including a distinct pre-project phase. The creation of the transdisciplinary programme GRACE required trust among the involved partners, an open atmosphere, structure, joint understanding among the participants, time to read and think, and some stubbornness.

There are several recent developments in technology and methods for the design, manufacture and operation of tooling for sheet metal forming. Technologies such as electric presses with accurately controlled motions and design tools such as forming simulations and AI technologies for knowledge capture and reuse are actively progressing. Manufacturing processes such as additive manufacturing and materials are advancing. There are advancements in the operation of the tooling via for example sensor technology. In this paper, a structured literature search is presented to understand the state of the art in sheet metal forming tooling. In addition, the paper presents an interview study with staff and management from five different industrial companies that are active in tooling design, manufacture, and operation. The objective is finding the current challenges for the companies and to what extent new technologies and methods are considered or being implemented to meet the current challenges. The interviews show that there are challenges concerning the lead time for tooling design and manufacture as well as the availability of the tooling in production. Although the companies have made recent investments, they are lacking the knowledge to fully exploit the potential of the new technologies. The paper strongly advocates for the utilization of technology to address the challenges within the tooling industry, aiming for enhanced efficiency and improved tooling design processes.

In this paper, a work procedure developed to support the collaboration and progress in the research project IDEAL - Integrated product and production platforms supporting agile and demand-driven industrial product realisation - is presented and its functionality discussed. The research project involved in total 13 researchers, five manufacturing companies and one software supplier. The research project was organised in four sub-projects, covering various aspects of a joint research question. The project started in April 2020 and ended in January 2024. The work procedure, called the ´IDEAL work procedure´, was developed based on the overall principles from interactive research combined with the framework for design research methodology (DRM). The developed work procedure provided a structure for the project, connecting the four subprojects, and thereby supported fulfilment of the joint research question. During the research project, the functionality of the ´IDEAL work procedure´ has been assessed in different ways, both in terms of how it was perceived and to what extent the planned results have been achieved. During the project we have carried out workshops to follow-up on the progress and the work procedure. In addition, follow-up interviews have been conducted with participants from involved companies. The results from the different assessment activities are synthesised and presented in this paper. To expand the applicability of the ´IDEAL work procedure´, the potential of the procedure to support transdisciplinary research is elaborated on in this paper.

Design of sheet metal forming tooling is currently based on that experienced tooling designers with good knowledge of how stamping tools previously have been designed and operated in production, apply their knowledge when making a new design. For retrieving former designs, they often need to rely on their good memory. In this paper, an automatic method for retrieving relevant former cases is presented. A major challenge is defining the similarity between the current and the former cases i.e., finding the relevant parameters to include in the CBR (Case-based reasoning) search. This is here addressed by using CAD model parameters both from former components and the tooling for their production. By interviewing tooling designers in industry, a set of relevant parameters has been identified. To arrive at the correct weight of each parameter, a genetic algorithm has been used to optimize the search results. This resulted in a quick and automated way of retrieving the most relevant former cases and presenting them to the designer. The method has been tested on actual cases with promising results. This has the potential of making sheet metal part and tooling design less reliant on memory and experience.

Ingress: Övergången till det cirkulära samhället har börjat. För tekniska högskolor och deras ingenjörsutbildningar innebär det stora förändringar.

A bill of materials (BOM) is a representation of the structure of parts and components in a product. The most well-known ones are the engineering (EBOM) and the manufacturing (MBOM). However, there are several more with various purposes throughout the lifecycle of the product. All BOMs are related to the part and component structure of the product but focus on different life cycle phases. They are often individually defined in product development creating a fragmented process. In this paper it is proposed to instead define a “master BOM” It is cross functional and includes all life cycle items. The master BOM has impact on the IT environment of a company as well as the organization of the work. In this paper, the creation and management of BOMs have been investigated in an industrial company. The IT environment of the company is currently heterogeneous, but there is a change towards a PLM centric environment. Results indicate that changing the IT environment and the structure of BOMs can integrate the different domains of the company better and facilitate the early phase assessment of the environmental impact of the products.

One crucial moment in product development is when all specifications of a product are ready, and the start of production is imminent. Companies very often have a milestone gate at this point where the development project is signed off and approved making sure that everything is ready and handing it over to the production department. This is a crucial moment involving checking a lot of information that has originated from different departments in the company. It can result in errors since the checking often is done manually and based on that staff check and report the results to a central function managing the transition. The situation is worsened by interoperability problems between different IT systems and databases used for different purposes in the company. In this paper it is examined how an automotive company currently is conducting the handover, gathering and checking all specifications before start of production. Risks of mistakes and unnecessary time loss are identified. In the paper it is discussed how the integration can be improved and the amount of manual work reduced. Results indicate that there is a potential for both saving time and reducing risk of error by automating parts of the handing over and integrating the IT systems and databases.

Many high-level technical products are associated with changing requirements, drastic design changes, lack of design information, and uncertainties in input variables which makes their design process iterative and simulation-driven. Regression models have been proven to be useful tools during design, altering the resource-intensive finite element simulation models. However, building regression models from computer-aided design (CAD) parameters is associated with challenges such as dealing with too many parameters and their low or coupled impact on studied outputs which ultimately requires a large training dataset. As a solution, extraction of hidden features from CAD is presented on the application of volume simulation of curtain airbags concerning geometric changes in design loops. After creating a prototype that covers all aspects of a real curtain airbag, its CAD parameters have been analyzed to find out the correlation between design parameters and volume as output. Next, using the design of the experiment latin hypercube sampling method, 100 design samples are generated and the corresponding volume for each design sample was assessed. It was shown that selected CAD parameters are not highly correlated with the volume which consequently lowers the accuracy of prediction models. Various geometric entities, such as the medial axis, are used to extract several hidden features (referred to as sleeping parameters). The correlation of the new features and their performance and precision through two regression analyses are studied. The result shows that choosing sleeping parameters as input reduces dimensionality and the need to use advanced regression algorithms, allowing designers to have more accurate predictions (in this case approximately 95%) with a reasonable number of samples. Furthermore, it was concluded that using sleeping parameters in regression-based tools creates real-time prediction ability in the early development stage of the design process which could contribute to lower development lead time by eliminating design iterations.

Some high-level technical products are associated with transdisciplinary simulation-driven design processes. Therefore, their design process involves many stakeholders and is prone to frequent changes, leading to a highly iterative process with a long lead time. Despite the decades of statistical approximations and metamodeling techniques on prediction models, companies are still striving toachieve fully automated real-time predictions in early design phases. The literature study shows a gap in existing methods such as not being fully real-time or suffering from high dimensionality. This paper presents a generic model for the development process of such described products and motivation for such modeling through a series of semi-structured interviews with an automotive sub-supplier company. The proposed process model points to the digital verification in every design loop as the bottleneck which is then confirmed by interviewees. As alternative solutions to overcome the problems, a method for data-driven and real-time prediction models is presented to enable the designer to foresee the consequence of their decision in the design phase. To evaluate the method, two examples of such real-time metamodeling techniques, developed in an ongoing research project are discussed. The proposed examples confirm that the framework can reduce lead time spent on digital verification and therefore accelerate the design process in such products.