The ability to efficiently and quickly design and manufacture highly customized product can provide a competitive advantage for companies acting on a market with shifting customer demands. A business model based on highly customized product requires advanced application systems for automating the work of generating product variants based on different customer specification. The establishment of a system for automated design and production preparation is a significant investment in time and money and is expected to give revenues over many years. To maintain a design automation system’s usefulness over time, frequent updating of design rules and execution control will normally become a necessity. Reuse of the system encapsulated generic product family descriptions when developing a new product family is also perceived to significantly increase the efficiency in system development. The scope and the purpose of this research originate from industrial problems and needs which have been identified within research projects carried out in near collaboration with industrial partners. New concepts, perceived as prescriptive models, are in this work introduced, evaluated, and refined which is in accordance with the design modelling approach [Duffy, Andreasen, 1995]. The focus of this paper is a case study carried out at a company with long experience of systems for automated variant design. The main objective is to provide a system foundation for modelling and management of product knowledge in design automation systems to support reuse, expansion and maintenance.

Computer supported engineering design systems are used as support for designers by automating some tasks/activities of design process. From industrial aspect, implementation of a developed prototype system is a critical task. User acceptance is of high importance and strongly related to the access and understanding of the knowledge which requires a high level of system transparency. In addition, integration of the system in the environment or its compatibility with other systems/tools should be considered. Our experiences in industry show that two major issues are usually raised up during implementing a design automation system which are: documentation and organization. Documentation concerns the way of capturing, storing and distributing the information in systems, and organization concerns alignment of the system with other systems or tools as well as communication and collaboration among system participants and users. The focus of this paper is on documentation and the importance of reuse, design rationale and traceability is discussed. In order to align closely with industry practices, the thoughts are presented along with an on-going case study, where the development and analysis of roof racks for cars are being automated, and a number of challenges have been discussed. 

Developing customized products is the business case for many manufacturing companies striving to fulfill the customers’ specific needs. When manufacturing customized products it is often necessary to also develop corresponding customized manufacturing tooling. There is a need to support concurrent development of new product variants along with their manufacturing toolsets. The communication between design engineers and manufacturing engineers is hence a key issue that if solved would enable design engineers to foresee how changes in product design affect tooling design and vice versa. To understand the correlation between the design of a product and its corresponding manufacturing tools, access to design rationale of the product and the developed tooling is required. Design rationale provides an explanation of why an artifact is designed in the way it is, including statements (textual, numerical or geometrical), argumentations, and decisions. Since design rationale is composed of information scattered all across the company's repositories in different formats (e.g. in type of a geometry, picture, table, and textual document), representing the design rationale is a challenge for many enterprises. In this paper a method is introduced that enables capture, structure and access to design rationale across product design and tooling design. The system enables representing design rationale in formats such as CAD models, spreadsheets, textual formats, and web pages. The method has been examined by developing a prototype system tested in a case company which develops and manufactures customized car accessories, such as roof racks and bike carriers, for different car models. The company develops and manufactures the products as well as the required tooling equipment. The prototype system includes different software commonly used by engineers during designing a product, for the purpose of making it applicable for other companies.

Implementing design automation systems to automate repetitive and time consuming design tasks enables engineer-to-order manufacturers to perform custom engineering in minimum time. To maintain a design automation system, regular updating of design information and knowledge is necessary. Consequently, there is a need of principles and methods to support capturing and structuring associated knowledge, specially, design rationale. In this paper a method for capturing, structuring, and accessing to design rationale in order to support maintenance of design automation systems is presented. The method is tested through a design automation system that develops FEA (finite element analysis) models automatically. The results are evaluated in a case company which is a supplier to the automotive industry serving many brands and car models which each more or less requires a unique solution.

In an integrated product and production development environment, where changes in tooling design affect the product design and vice versa, access to design rationale of tooling would support concurrent development of new product variants and required tooling. This paper presents an information model that enables easy capture and access to the design rationale of toolings, moreover, supports tracing relevant information within different design software applications. A solution based on integrating SolidWorks, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Word has been developed and an industrial case study, where the system is introduced and evaluated is presented.

Due to increasing complexity of modern products it is many times impossible for single individual engineers to fully grasp the product they are a part of developing. Valuable time during the product development is therefore spent searching for knowledge about different aspect of the product. To enable engineers finding right knowledge in different situations, the knowledge must first of all exist. Secondly, it needs to be structured and thirdly, it needs to be accessible. In this paper all of these three aspects of design rationale (reasons for why the product is designed the way it is) are addressed with the main focus on the latter one, accessibility. An information model is presented that can be used to structure the design rationale. It also presents a schematic overview of how a cloud solution could be realized using the information model to make a complete system for instantly capturing, filtering and accessing design rationale in a contextual manner.

To enable the instant and contextual capture, filtering and access of the design rationale, the design rationale management systems should be present to the engineers everywhere in the digital environment, ready for service. It should also include functions that make the design rationale shared to all privileged users making sure everyone has updated versions of the stored knowledge.

In this work the main ideas of a method for instant and contextual capture, filtering and access of the design rationale are introduced and a pilot system described as a proof of concept. The pilot system can be used to capture, filter and access design rationale across and within text-documents, spread sheets and CAD-models.

Product platforms play an important role for the efficient customisation and variant forming of products in many companies. In this paper four different companies ranging from OEM to B2B suppliers have been interviewed on how they engage in technology and product development, create and maintain product platforms and how they respond to the changing requirements on the platforms and on the products and product families derived from them. The objective is to find how product platforms are used to meet the demands of efficient product customisation. The companies all have identifiable product platforms and established processes for product development. However, there are differences in how they define technology development, how the platforms are created, maintained, replaced and what the platforms contain. The introduction of new technology into the platforms and how the platforms are used from a Lean product development perspective has been of interest in the survey as reported in the paper.

Individualized products, resource-smart design and production, and afocus on customer value have been pointed out as three opportunities for Swedishindustry to stay competitive on a globalized market. All these three opportunitiescan be gained by efficient design and manufacture of highly customized products.However, this requires the development and integration of the knowledge-basedenabling technologies of the future as pointed out by The European Factories ofthe Future Research Association (EFFRA). Highly custom engineered productsrequire an exercising of a very rich and diverse knowledge base about the products,their production and the required resources for design and manufacture. Thedevelopment and implementation of systems for automated design and productionpreparation of customized products is a significant investment in time and money.However, our experience from industry indicates that significant efforts arerequired to introduce and align these kinds of systems with existing operations,legacy systems and overall state of practice. In this paper, support for systemdevelopment in literature has been reviewed in combination with a survey on thestate of practice in four companies regarding implementation and management ofautomated systems for custom engineered products. A gap has been identified anda set of areas for further research are outlined.

In this paper interviews with staff involved in product development from four different companies is presented. The objective is to find out how the companies manage the technical risk of introducing new technology in products and how they prepare for meeting changing requirements from customers. The companies originates from aerospace, automotive and production engineering. Based on the results of the first study, a case study was carried out at the aerospace company. The studies shows that, the introduction of new technology varies with the risk of failure in the validation of the products. Companies that easily can revert back to the former technology is more risk taking. The types of products and the companies’ place in the supply chain has an impact on technology introduction and requirements handling. The companies have strategies for developing requirement specifications prior to the start of the project. This is most elaborate at the aerospace company where a thorough concept evaluation clarify possible variations in requirements.