Product platforms and product family design have been recognized as successful methods to enable masscustomization strategies. However, companies working with products where pre-defined product variants are not feasible require a more generic platform with re-usable components as well as engineering resources. Extended CAD-models is an approach where CAD-models are utilized as carriers of information to support re-usability of both geometric content and engineering activities, decreasing product development lead-time and enabling the definition of a product family within Engineer-To-Order business contexts. The following paper presents the approach in more detail and the results of a multi-case study where three Swedish industrial companies were interviewed. Results show that all companies store information within the CAD-models to support re-usability. Several challenges were expressed such as managing responsibilities and modeling flexible CAD-models. Future trends involve the concept, but to which extent is not clear.

Product development is an iterative process, partially due to changes in both company internal and external product requirements, resulting in changes to the product under development. These changes might require recapitulation of design rationale and result in re-doing assessments and syntheses of different kinds. One way to support this work is to proactively model in such a way that as much as possible of the previous work can be re-used. Not only within one product development project but also across and to future ones. Modelling for re-use can be done by documenting design rationale and formalising performed activities as design guidelines or computer scripts. To be able to find and re-use this information it could be attached to the product features which it relates to. Since geometry is such a core product characteristic, especially within the mechanical industry, and is often modelled as CAD-models, this paper presents a review of CAD-model capabilities and restrictions to serve as a carrier of multidisciplinary information. This is done by; enquiring three Swedish companies, exploring an automated Finite Element Analysis method utilising the CAD-model as a carrier of information, and reviewing different CAD software capabilities. Results show that there are at least seven extension techniques, out of which all are currently being used or considered to be in the future, by at least one company. Further, depending on the extension technique, extendibility and human-comprehension of the added information differ.

Product platform development is a well-established approach for reusing product knowledge in the form of geometry and its configuration rules and constraints. Explicitly defining all platform components is not always possible however. This is why a product platform approach where the processes of realising platform components also are supported is needed, instead of exclusively relying on their results. The work presented here works toward this, with a focus on automated tool development enabled by extending design assets from different tools.

Design automation can be used to support efficient information handling and knowledge processing in computer-based product modelling, as well as make possible new design exploration and optimisation capabilities. To be able to utilise and manage design automation systems over time, it is important to understand how the disciplinary methods and models are dependent on each other through the product model constituents and then how these relations should be built to support maintenance, leveraging and future reuse. Awareness of the concrete representation of relations could support the system's traceability and transparency, and depending on the chosen technique, comprehension and extendability can be affected. This paper presents a conceptual framework for how a set of product model constituents are, can and to some extent, should be extended to define relations in multidisciplinary design automation systems.

One interesting method to take advantage of the particular capabilities of Additive Manufacturing is to utilize a combination of lattice-structures and topology optimization. This paper presents the results and experiences from attempting to incorporate these in an existing multidisciplinary design automation system within the aerospace industry. A combined state of art and practice is outlined with discussions regarding challenges in current commercial CAD tools, multidisciplinary design automation, and with respect to aerospace requirements.