The production preparation process (3P) enables collaboration between design and production engineers during product development but its efficiency is limited by the abundance of documentation of manufacturing constraints and capabilities. Empirical studies showed that use of production requirements can increase the efficiency of 3P, however, the support for production engineers to capture and share production requirements is scarce. A method to support production engineers in identifying, defining, structuring and sharing production requirements and collaborating with design engineers is presented. The method has three major parts - focus areas and requirement categories, a worksheet for production requirements capturing and prioritization, and a workflow for using the worksheet. The method was developed in collaboration with practitioners and contributes to the existing knowledge by providing production engineers with a structured way of working with production requirements. Evaluation of the method in the case company showed its usability when developing product variants and that additional work is needed to support the development of new product families and assembly lines.

Product development is multidisciplinary with high uncertainties necessitating coordinated decision-making between design and production. This paper presents a method to work with production requirements to support production preparation during product development aligned with different product and production maturities. The work was conducted in collaboration with two global manufacturing firms. The method supports identification, definition, and structuring of production requirements and the collaboration between design and production engineers for requirement prioritization and follow-up. 

Changing customer requirements, regulations, technology and regulations, shift to automated assembly and product variety are common challenges faced by many manufacturing industries and alignment between product and production system is critical for business success. Design engineers should be aware of production constraints and capabilities to ensure efficient manufacture and assembly of products that are developed. This requires different and detailed support to guide the work, evaluate different design solutions, enable continuous and concurrent work with design for producibility and production preparation. A study was conducted in three companies to understand alignment and integration of product development and production preparation processes. Also, utilization of production requirements, design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) and failure modes and effect analysis (FMEA) to support design for producibility (DFP) was studied. Currently, production preparation is done through discussions between design and production engineers. Production preparation and work with DFMA and FMEA is skill and experience dependent. Definition, structuring and sharing of production requirements on different system levels, from production and product perspectives are identified as critical to supporting design for producibility and production preparation. The work with FMEA and DFMA can be developed and improved with systematic and structured way of working with production requirements.

New business opportunities are created when the advantage of changeable manufacturing systems expand beyond increased freedom in production location to increased freedom in product design. However, there are new challenges to overcome, including improved ability to design and adapt products when requirements from stakeholders quickly change and/or new technology rapidly evolves. Simultaneously, the producibility of each design must be ensured while keeping the lead-time of the whole process to the minimum. Changeable product platforms (both flexible and adaptable platforms) are gaining attention in both research and industry. However, the level of alignment and integration of product development and production is critical for the efficiency of the product realization process. In this study, we map the state of practice in five companies with an initial literature review. The companies had no formal platform strategy and faced challenges with variant management and development time, had manual processes for production preparation and reuse of technical solutions and knowledge happened through components and documents. The production preparation and reuse were dependent on the engineer’s competence. Future work will concentrate on identifying how manufacturing inputs can be added as a design asset in a changeable product platform to enhance producibility and production preparation.

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.

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.

Research and development is a knowledge-intense activity where HR departments must balance many internal tensions, such as that between development versus project management, or research versus product standardisation. The first issue may ensure long-term survival and the second, short-term profitability. Another contrasting pair of issues is technical knowledge vs. administrative knowledge. Forging a career path in a manufacturing business often entails abandoning the technical work for the benefit of completing administrative or management work. The chapter discusses how HR departments can handle knowledge management and provide new ways to benefit both the individual and the company.

Custom engineered products require an engineer-to-order approach in development, quotation preparation and order processing. This work reports the result of a three-and-a-half-year project were the objective was to develop means for implementation and management of computer support for engineering design and production engineering of customized products. Efficient re-use is essential for success and decision is identified as the core concept to trace tasks executed, knowledge used, design rationale and artefacts developed throughout the product realization process.

Many manufacturing companies are suppliers that deliver unique solutions to different business customers. Intense quotation work, with a high demand on accuracy and quick response, and development projects executed in close collaboration with customers and other actors characterize these companies. The projects can run for years or a few weeks depending on the business. Changes of requirements are frequent and technology development required for improved functionality, sustainability and competitiveness. The use of a product platform has been acknowledged as a strategic enabler for product family development and mass customization. However, companies struggle with adopting the common platform approach building upon pre-defined modules and components as it constraints the fulfilment of unique customer requirements and the introduction of new technology at high pace. This work reports the results from case studies conducted in collaboration with four companies. They are in many ways different but face the same challenges when it comes to customization, fluctuating requirements and need of high pace in technology advancement. The focus of this paper is on their initial states; including how they work with their product concept before the customer entry point, the work that is initiated when an order is accepted, the character of requirements and the adoption of product platforms. Criteria on, and identification of, new platforms models, termed Design Assets, are presented followed by a mapping to the Design Platform concept pointing out areas upcoming work, both scientifically and at the companies.

Identification and clarification of relationships between product properties is fundamentally important in industrial product development. The process is however frequently perceived difficult. The presented research aims at clarifying if a visual tool can provide help in this work. The tool is a combination of previously known techniques and has so far been implemented at two product developing companies. Results and reactions from the tests are hitherto positive and the conclusion is therefore that this extended casual diagram can be a useful addition to the product developer's toolbox.

Manufactures, developing products, need to adapt and improve their practices taking advantage of technology advancements and simultaneously develop products and solutions to fit a new world. This paper discusses how societal and technological trends drive the need for change and evolution in what is called Systems Engineering Design (SED), indicating a systems view on engineering design. Through an analysis and selected examples it is argued that SED capabilities need to better address the width and complexity of design problem, takes advantages of increased computational power and sensing technologies to master future challenges. An important factor for successful deployment and change in industrial context, is the need for interactive and visual aids and easily accessible support methods. This can pave the way also for advanced SED support.

There is a trend toward increased customization of goods to satisfy a wide range of customers using product platforms. However, there is an erroneous notion that product platforms can only be used to provide economic viability in production thanks to the reuse of physical components among a family of products. Yet, this is a limited perception of the potential of a product platform. In this article, an object-oriented approach to support the development of product platforms is proposed to increase efficiency through reuse and flexibility of designs among a family of products. Two modes of the platform development process are addressed: platform preparation and platform execution. Platform preparation prescribes the methods needed to model platform objects, using enhanced function-means models and set-based concurrent engineering processes. During the platform execution process, sets of design alternatives can be configured concurrently throughout the conceptual, system, and detailed phases of the platform development. Three cases illustrate how the same approach may be used in different design scenarios: design space exploration and extension, supply-chain collaboration, and configure-to-order. The approach supports system architects and design engineers in making design decisions that propel the platform development work by enabling analysis in stages where designs are immature and evaluating the goodness of the alternatives early. Ultimately, product platforms can be efficiently developed for modularity and scalability to find feasible product variants and meet the needs of a multitude of customers.

This paper presents a new way to support early assessment of interacting product and manufacturing technologies based on system maturity. This approach is illustrated by an example from the aerospace industry, where alternative technologies are introduced in an existing product and manufacturing systems platform. By assessing the system maturity of interacting technologies, alternative solutions can be eliminated before early technology commitment. This is beneficial for 1) clarifying the company’s status regarding capability and maturity, 2) eliminating immature technologies within a certain capability bandwidth, and 3) prioritizing advanced technology development initiatives with respect to the risk of implementing a manufacturing technology to interact with a product technology. It may also enable reduction in design rework and manufacturing rework that comes with failed maturity matching of product systems and manufacturing systems, thus possible reduction in lead-time and cost could be met.

In many industrial sectors, modularization of products and services is considered as an important contribution to increased efficiency and competitiveness. Research has developed many modularization approaches, however, there is a gap between industrial practice in modularization and state-of-research in this field, which partly is due to shortcomings in "measuring"the value and state of modularization. This papers contribution is an analysis of industrial real-world cases to contrast practice and research, and a compilation of metrics in the context of modular product design from research. 

The main objective of this article is to structure and clarify the transdisciplinary reality of modularization as a foundation for handling business-driven modularization of smart products. Lately, the complexity has increased in the industry due to global manufacturing, different customer requirements, legal requirements, digitalization, new business models, and the evolvement of smart products. The increasingly complex reality has been acknowledged on an enterprise engineering level where complexity is one part of different grand challenges for enterprises. This complexity needs to be handled both horizontally (in the whole value chain) and vertically (on all management levels). It is therefore essential to clarify the modularization landscape by bringing together the business domain, and the engineering domain to cater for the future of modularization. The main contribution of this paper is to suggest a conceptualization of the modularization domain through a meta-model that covers essential aspects of business-driven modularization of smart products.

The specification of interfaces is critical in modularization and product architecture development. Literature defines product architecture as (1) the arrangement of functional elements, (2) the mapping from functional elements to physical components (3) the specification of the interfaces between interacting physical components. However, other scholars state that interfaces should include more than physical components, such as spatial, material, energy, and information exchange. This view has been extended to include attachment, transfer, control and communication, power, spatial, field, and environmental interfaces. However, to use interfaces through the product lifecycle and reuse them between product architectures and generations, there must be an approach to handle applicable interfaces in a company. This research contributes by presenting a way to operationalize (investigate an abstract concept, it's essential to make it measurable and tangible) interfaces by introducing interface requirements that are definable, measurable, definable, and testable properties as a part of the interface development process and interface description. The method is illustrated by applying it in an industrial case study.

Industrialized housebuilding (IHB) is a sector within the construction trade where product platforms have been introduced from the mechanical industry to manage the product architecture and allow mass customization. The aim of this study is to analyze product development projects connected to the product platform and the production. For IHB, the backbone is a technical platform where components are designed and combined. Clients are satisfied, avoiding compromising the technical platform and the product architecture of the different variants. However, the adaptation to production is decisive and production has increased automation, with less flexibility in relation to the products. Still, product development has focused on the engineering view and the development of building components which fit in the predefined or well-established production facility while at the same time satisfy customer demands, i.e., maintaining the balance between distinctiveness and commonality. The study has observed one IHB company and two of their development projects focusing on changes in the product architecture for components across several of their product families. The development has been carried out in a bottom-up fashion. The results indicate difficulties in finding solutions, which fit production. An integrated design of production obstructs product development; the selection of project participants may affect the project results, both in terms of prior experience but also the problem-solving ability; the lack of project documentation is costly since experience is not captured, which could be recycled in future developments.

Improved resource efficiency, in industry and throughout the product life cycle, is a challenge and potentially, integrated product and production platforms can act as support. The aim of this study is to explore the current state of the technical platform in two industrialized housebuilding (IHB) companies from a mixed product architecture perspective. The study is part of a collaboration also involving three manufacturing companies and one IT provider. The research is crossing borders by means of interactive research and transdisciplinary engineering, and more than 50 practitioners and 13 researchers with competences in product management, engineering design, computational engineering, software development, production development, testing, quality, sourcing, and project management have been involved. Product platforms have been introduced in IHB to better control mixed product architectures and allow mass customization. Commonly, there is a technical platform for product architecture management, and a process platform for production management. High customization levels have resulted in an increasing number of variants not efficiently utilizing the technical platform. The results show that strong clients have negative influence on the technical platform while offering multiple products may facilitate simpler management of the technical platform but makes it more difficult to make changes and improvements.

For many companies, proficiency in introducing new technologies is central to their business. For instance, for suppliers in the aerospace industry, having extensive knowledge about a specific technology can be crucial for getting to take part in the next airplane project. However, when new technologies emerge as a result of advanced engineering, they are often hard to implement in product platforms. The fragile nature of a working platform originates from the complex relationships between subsystems and variants. Introducing a new technology into the already fine-tuned platform may affect the performance of the platform negatively, or generate a too large development effort to handle. This may lead to reluctance towards introduction of new promising technologies, which in the long run may result in technologies being discarded as infeasible or being introduced much later than necessary. To be able to assess the impact of a technology and safely accommodate it in an existing platform architecture, it needs to be modeled appropriately. Current models of technologies do not describe them in relation to the architecture they are to be implemented in. Further, the common platform architecture models describe change scenarios from a top-down perspective. Technology introduction would require changing the platform from a bottom-up perspective. This paper suggests an approach to accommodate introduction of emerging technologies into a product platform by means of: - Modeling the technologies as systems in a shared model. - Using trade-off curves to describe the bandwidth of technologies. - Introducing a method for changing a present product platform to incorporate new technologies The method addresses a number of different factors regarding the new technology, e.g. its maturity level, in order to assess the appropriate course of action to safely use the technology in the existing platform. The approach is illustrated using a case from the aerospace industry covering the implementation of water-cooling technology as a means to increase the performance of a jet engine component.

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) is a comprehensive approach to achieve efficiency in product development by providing guidelines to align the development activities. Given a certain range in a design problem, a set of design solutions is defined. Eliminating infeasible regions gradually narrows the set down to a working solution. Similar to platform-based development, SBCE further aims to reuse design knowledge from past development efforts. Although they share the goal of design reuse, there is a fundamental difference between SBCE and platform-based design. The SBCE design process produces one solution while the creation and use of a platform produces a product family. This paper elaborates an approach for platform concept development. It uses set-based concurrent engineering and its principles to develop a platform based on functions and design solutions while preserving the bandwidth. It shows how function-means trees and trade-off curves can represent solution spaces. Further, these spaces are narrowed down to manageable and desirable size to represent a product platform in line with current technology and available manufacturing capabilities. The approach is illustrated with a case from the aerospace industry showing how a manufacturer of parts for a jet engine can develop comprehensive concepts for a platform. The design space is narrowed down using desired bandwidth and compatibility between design solutions. While the approach has proven feasible in the test case, it requires manufacturing and technology development to produce trade-off curves. This implicitly requires technology development and manufacturing development to precede product development. Alternatively, product development, production development and technology development need to be perfectly coordinated in a concurrent manner.

One problem in incremental product development is that geometric models are limited in their ability to explore radical alternative design variants. In this publication, a function modeling approach is suggested to increase the amount and variety of explored alternatives, since function models (FM) provide greater model flexibility. An enhanced function-means (EF-M) model capable of representing the constraints of the design space as well as alternative designs is created through a reverse engineering process. This model is then used as a basis for the development of a new product variant. This work describes the EF-M model's capabilities for representing the design space and integrating novel solutions into the existing product structure and explains how these capabilities support the exploration of alternative design variants. First-order analyses are executed, and the EF-M model is used to capture and represent already existing design information for further analyses. Based on these findings, a design space exploration approach is developed. It positions the FM as a connection between legacy and novel designs and, through this, allows for the exploration of more diverse product concepts. This approach is based on three steps-decomposition, design, and embodiment-A nd builds on the capabilities of EF-M to model alternative solutions for different requirements. While the embodiment step of creating the novel product's geometry is still a topic for future research, the design space exploration concept can be used to enable wider, more methodological, and potentially automated design space exploration. 

There is a demand on the current markets of industrialized house building for higher product design flexibility and customization. One of the success factors in addressing this challenge efficiently is the formalization and use of product platforms through information technology applications. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how product platforms and their use should be modeled to support the development of information technology applications. The aim of this paper is therefore, to increase the knowledge on information modeling of product platforms and their use in the industrialized house building design process. The available information modeling methods were identified and analyzed using literature review while considering the contextual criteria of industrialized house building. An information modelling method for product platforms and their use in the industrialized house building design process is proposed. The information modeling rationale is synthesized using the design platform modeling and the information delivery manual modeling. The former is a PLM-oriented while the latter is a BIM-oriented information modeling method. The proposed information modeling method is composed of three parts: product platform information model, process maps and exchange requirement specification. Future work should aim for the validation of the proposed information modeling method by application on empirical data in a case study.

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering is described as an effective methodology for product development, but is also hard to implement in companies using traditional development processes. This paper suggests a new way to introduce Set-Based Concurrent Engineering by combining its three principles with a modified morphological chart. A structured process with design templates is proposed and incorporated in a computer tool. The approach is evaluated by using information from an industrial case study. The result indicates that the principles of Set-based Concurrent Engineering can be implemented in a traditional development process by the proposed process and computer tool.

The cooperation between firms and academia is often seen as an effective way to provide disciplinary skills and knowledge of system building for inexperienced students. In theory, cooperation has many advantages: The students get first-hand knowledge of the industrial environment and experiences of working with professional designers. In this way they get an opportunity to feel the pace of realistic projects as well as an opportunity to show their skills for future employment. Not only the students benefit from this cooperation; the firms gain new innovative ideas and knowledge of the latest development techniques. They also get good leverage on the resources invested since the amount of hours spent by the student teams could be tenfold the contribution of the firms.

In real life, the cooperation between firms and academia can be both time-consuming as well as troublesome. One reason for this is that their objectives are different: The teachers want the students to learn and the companies want to make money. To overcome unnecessary barriers in cooperative design projects, a set of guidelines have been created at the School of Engineering at Jönköping University in Sweden. The guidelines have been developed from the experiences of collaborating with more than 30 different companies between the years 2000 and 2006. One finding is the importance of aligning the expected project outcome between students, teachers and companies. Another important aspect is to ensure that the standard of the work is high enough in order to satisfy the firms. This is achieved by a careful selection of projects and by comprehensive coaching of the students using a proven framework of learning design.

During product development, most of the customer value, as well as the cost and the quality of a product are defined. This key role of development in industry has led to an intense search for better ways to develop products, software, services and systems. Two development methodologies that have received positive attention for their efficiency are Set-Based Concurrent Engineering and platform-based design.

This thesis presents the results of implementing the principles of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) in platform-based design as a means to improve the industrial product development. The contribution is a better understanding of SBCE and new ways to use its principles to support development processes. The results are developed in collaboration with industry and demonstrate that SBCE gives positive effects on many aspects of product development performance and on the resulting products. Further, it clarifies that SBCE has a distinctive way to manage the design space that promotes a thorough understanding of the important design parameters before committing to a specific design.

Finally, this work presents a structured design process for managing the first phases of platform development. The studies in this thesis show that previous approaches in literature do not present methodological support for developing product architectures in the earliest stages of platform development. This work fills this void by introducing a new design methodology for modelling, assessing and narrowing down the architectural design space in the phases before embodiment. It allows exploration of more alternatives in the earliest phases of development, which ultimately may produce better designs. 

During product development, most of the customer value, as well as the cost and the quality of a product are defined. This key role of development in industry has led to an intense search for better ways to develop products, software, services and systems. One development methodology that has received positive attention is Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE). Some authors claim that SBCE and related practices from Lean Development are four times more productive than traditional development models. Unfortunately, SBCE is also described as hard to implement. This thesis presents the results of a three year research project aimed at implementing and describing the effects of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering in industry. The scope of the research is to use the principles of SBCE as a means to improve the productivity of industrial product development processes and its resulting products. The contribution of this work is a better understanding of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering and a support to implement its principles. The results show that SBCE gives positive effects on many aspects of product development performance and on the resulting products. The improvements are especially dominant on product performance, product cost and the level of innovation Moreover, a comparison between a Set-based decision process and a traditional matrix for design evaluation is presented, showing that these two approaches generate different results. The matrix evaluation promoted the development of new technology and the Set-based process promoted a thorough understanding of the important design parameters of the current designs. Finally, this work presents a structured design process and computer tool for implementing the principles of SBCE. The process was demonstrated by using information from an industrial development project, showing how the proposed process could implement the three principles of SBCE in a traditional Point-based development environment.

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering is sometimes seen as a means to dramatic improvements in product design processes. In spite of its popularity in literature, the number of reported applications has so far been limited. This paper adds new information by describing implementations of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering in four product developing companies. The research took a case study approach, with the objective to investigate if the principles of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of the development process. The study shows that set-based projects can be driven within an existing organization, if given proper support. The participants claim that a set-based approach has a positive effects on development performance, especially on the level of innovation, product cost and performance. The improvements were achieved at the expense of slightly higher development costs and longer lead time. However, the positive effects are dominating and the companies involved intend to use Set-Based Concurrent Engineering in future projects when appropriate.

Modularisation and platform strategies enable efficient utilization of resources through economies of scale and are therefore increasingly important for manufacturing companies. On the product side, modules are often considered the basis of product platforms by enabling a variety of product variants by combining interchangeable modules into different products. On the process side, modularisation enables faster and cheaper development of new product variants by reusing physical components, interfaces, and production equipment.

The benefits of product platforms and modularisation have led two global product developing and manufacturing companies to initiate research projects within this field. The companies have previously made unsuccessful attempts to implement modularisation founded on a componentbased approach and the firms are now searching for other methods to get the benefits of modularisation.

This paper describes the initial state of practice in modularisation and product platforms in the two companies in their attempts to move from a purely physical approach to modularisation into the universal view that is presented in the Design Platform approach. Here, a platform is viewed as an evolutionary entity involving several company assets such as processes, knowledge, methods, and relationships which are essential to gain the benefits of platforms also in the development phase. The Design Platform contains various concrete resources such as the geometry of physical components, but also inhomogeneous resources such as design rules, processes, methods and design automation.

The results point to specific barriers that the companies experience when trying to adopt a modularisation strategy. Several barriers are experienced by both companies while some are specific for one of the companies. Through several workshops, the concepts of the Design Platform and a flexible view on modularisation are introduced, and their possibilities are elaborated and appreciated by the workshop participants.

Lean Product Development (LPD) presents ways for companies to restructure and improve their organisations, and an underlying assumption of LPD is that knowledge and learning are critical in such a process.

Previous literature suggested that the A3 report could be used as a knowledge carrier in product development, but it has not shown how this could be accomplished. In this paper, we present an approach to use the A3 report to support knowledge management. The approach was developed in collaboration with and tested at an R&D department.

The theoretical contribution of the paper is its suggestion of a new way of viewing A3s. The application of the concept of boundary object to the A3 report enables us to use the A3 as a powerful means of transferring knowledge from tacit to explicit forms. The empirical contribution presents the A3 knowledge management structure, which supports knowledge codification, transfer and creation.

For the last seven years a successful cooperation between courses in product design and industrial design has been running at the School of Engineering at Jönköping University (JTH), Sweden. The concept of fusing separate courses with different domains of knowledge into one project is of course well known by most teachers, but this course takes this form of education one step further. This paper will describe the experience of coaching over 90 design-build-test projects going through the steps design, build, test but also the steps of fail and learn.

This paper describes a new design approach that implements the three principles of Set-based Concurrent Engineering by using the concept of Configurable Component modelling. Several case studies has proven the efficiency of Configurable Component modelling as well as the Set-based philosophy, and by combining these two research areas, a computer based modelling of Configurable Component objects is used to support the Set-based philosophy. The approach is demonstrated by a case study that indicates a promising future of combining Set-based Concurrent Engineering with Configurable Component modelling for re-design problems.

Modules are often considered the basis of product platforms by enabling a variety of product variants based on interchangeable modules. In this way, modules enable efficient utilization of resources through economies of scale. The purpose of this work is to improve the product realization process by introducing a new model for module classification that enable companies to structure their assets and formalizing them in the development system. The modules developed following this methodology contains both physical resources and non-physical resources that can be reused in a structured way, thereby improving the efficiency of the development process. 

The introduction of product platforms has been acknowledged as a strategic enabler for increased business competitiveness. A vast body of research has described different aspects of platforms, but little work has been done on defining or delimiting the different types of elements that may build up a platform. Design assets include platform elements that are not commonly considered as a part of a platform. Previous research has suggested the introduction of formalized design assets to systematically extend an items-based platform with intangible elements. These are transdisciplinary objects, specifically prepared for reuse between projects to provide support for a wide range of engineering activities: specialized CAD geometry, working methods, spread sheets, function models or different types of knowledge representations, among others. The presented research is part of a larger project seeking to improve the collaboration between product development and manufacturing. This paper focuses on the use of potential and formal design assets at a development department of a global manufacturer of consumer products. The results show that the application of formal design assets depends on several factors, such as the level of professional experience and individual working styles. The contribution of the paper is a description of which formal and informal design assets that are used and a discussion on how the formal assets can be better utilized.

A vast body of research has described product platforms as strategic enablers for increased business competitiveness, but there is a lack of empirical research describing what types of assets that are used in industry as elements in a platform. Previous research has suggested a platform as a “collection of assets shared by a group of products” and also classified these assets into four transdisciplinary categories: Components, Processes, Knowledge and People and Relationships. This categorization is, however, too imprecise to identify the core assets needed to build a platform, and better guidance is needed. This paper presents a cross-case study of assets used in the product development process at two case companies. These represent two different product disciplines: Industrialized housebuilding, a sector within the construction trade, and Outdoor Power Equipment producing forest and gardening tools. The main contribution of the paper is a comparison of what formal and informal design assets that are used in the two disciplines.

The use of a product platform has been acknowledged as a strategic enabler for product family development and mass customisation. However, many companies struggle with adopting the common platform approach building upon pre-defined modules and components as it constrains the fulfilment of unique customer requirements and a rapid introduction of new technologies. These are the conditions under which manufacturing companies acting as suppliers operates, where unique solutions are delivered to different business customers, market segments or brands. This work reports the results from case studies of platform development conducted in collaboration with five product developing and manufacturing companies. The focus of this paper is on their initial states; including how they work with their product concept before a development project is started, the character of requirements and the adoption of product platforms. The main contribution of this work is a presentation of criteria on, and identification of, new platform elements termed design assets. These are introduced as a means to enable diverse types of resources to be reused in a company and a pragmatic way to bridge the gap between the physical products and the knowledge, tools and methods needed to realise these.

Academic development projects are often carried out in the sequence Design – Build – Test (DBT), resembling the prevalent industrial development process. In this, an early decision is made on which solution to the problem at hand should be developed, after which a prototype is built and tested while attempting to fulfil the market requirements. One of several drawbacks associated with this approach is its premature selection of the best alternative among several unfinished designs. In recent years, an alternative development method has attracted positive attention. This “Lean Product Development” (LPD) philosophy implies that careful attention should be given to the earlier stages of the development process, in order to gain sufficient knowledge to solve the problem. To align academic design project with the LPD philosophy, we propose a shift in design-build experiences from the Design – Build – Test of today to the Test – Design – Build (TDB). The proposed also makes design-build experiences applicable to engineering disciplines where size and cost of prototypes have previously been obstacles to implementation, such as architecture and civil engineering.

A common cause for delays in product development is a premature introduction of new technologies. This can be the case also when organizations have failed to use the existing knowledge of technologies and other engineering assets. One way to increase the reuse of existing engineering assets is to ensure that these assets are relevant, retrievable and renewed. This can be achieved by applying Flexible Modularization as a structured way to organize and reuse engineering assets. This paper presents the introduction of Flexible Modularization at two international product developing and manufacturing companies. It presents three different examples of Flexible Modules and a guideline for developing Flexible Modules in an industrial context. 

Functional modelling can be challenging to integrate with physical CAD-modelling, since the natures of these representations are quite different. This paper presents a methodology seeking to bridge these representations in a product platform context. The contribution of this work is a pragmatic way to improve the connections between Functional Requirements and CAD models. It does so by structuring functions, features and components and by linking these through tags in CAD-models. The methodology thereby associates the CAD models to the functional knowledge used when creating them. The result is the functional mapping chart, which is illustrated by an example from the automotive industry.

One way for firms to stay competitive is to adapt a platform approach. In product platforms, modules are used as exchangeable design blocks to create a variety in product performance. This is a proven way to get advantages of scale in production by reusing physical parts and investments in manufacturing. To ensure exchangeability between modules, interfaces between modules must be well defined. Hence, from this point of view, there is no such thing as flexible modules. In this research, flexibility refers to the idea of identifying strategic portions of the platform where flexibility is needed and to create the modular division in a way that the assigned modules are de-coupled in theses areas. The presented approach shows how the Design platform concept can be extended by the introduction of flexible modules. These support the Design Platforms by allowing areas of strategic importance to be more flexible and thereby enable room for uncertainties such as fluctuating requirements and future technical development.

The establishment of a platform architecture is a critical task but there is no methodological support for this in the first phases of development. There are several approaches for evaluating designs and architectures when an initial design is present, however, not for the phases foregoing the embodiment of ideas into concepts. This paper fills this void by introducing a new design methodology for modelling, assessing and narrowing down the architectural design space. It allows exploration of more alternatives in the earliest phases of development, which ultimately may produce better designs. The result is a design space of a manageable and desirable size for subsequent embodiment and detailed design with traditional engineering tools. The advantage is that feasibility of the candidate platforms have been established to a high degree of certainty. The approach is illustrated with a case of redesign showing how a manufacturer of parts for a jet engine can use the methodology to model and assess platform concepts in the earliest phase of development.

The purpose of this work is to develop a new design methodology for product platforms that combines Enhanced Function-Means Modelling and Set-Based Concurrent Engineering. The methodology presents new ways to narrow down the design space, which is increasingly important when several alternative designs are generated in Set-Based Concurrent Engineering. The result is the Architectural Option Chart that uses functional couplings between functional requirements and design solutions to eliminate unfeasible platform members.

In most development processes, there is an early phase dedicated to creative concept development aiming at finding solutions to the problem at hand. To arrive at a high-quality solution, several ideas may be conceived and evaluated. However, emerging information and knowledge about product concepts is often not shared on a corporate level since only the final result is documented. This can lead to a significant waste, especially in Set-based design. This paper presents a pragmatic way to structure emerging design information, transferring individual design knowledge to a corporate level. It introduces the Concept Dashboard to track the progress of the concept development and uses an industry standard project workflow system to store and retrieve emerging concept knowledge.

This paper describes experiences from implementation of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering in four different product developing companies. The objective was to investigate if the principles of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering can improve the efficiency and the effectiveness of the development process in industrial cases, but also to identify barriers for its implementation. The study shows that set-based projects can be driven within an existing organization, given the proper support. The participants claim that a set-based approach gives positive effects on development performance, especially on the level of innovation, product cost and performance. The improvements were achieved at the expense of slightly higher development costs and longer lead time. However, the positive effects are dominating and the companies involved intend to use Set-Based Concurrent Engineering in future projects when appropriate.

As organisations grow, consequences of poor knowledge management are evident for new employees in product developing companies. The problem of leveraging existing knowledge between development projects and departments is still relevant. This paper presents an industrial case study of a traditional manufacturing company and extends prior research addressing the reuse of organisational knowledge in new product development. The paper outlines barriers that hinder effective reuse of codified engineering knowledge and suggest means to overcome those barriers by using A3-reports in the PLM-system.

The circular economy (CE) is an economic philosophy aimed at eliminating waste and the continual use of resources. It emphasises designing products for longevity, reuse, and recycling to create a closed-loop system. One of the goals of enterprise modelling (EM) is to support enterprises in change processes from the current situation into a desired future state. In the context of the transition to the CE, the question arises if and how EM methods and languages must be adapted for the CE. The main contributions of this work are a better understanding of the challenges manufacturing enterprises face when preparing their product architectures for the circular economy, a meta-model preparing the product perspective in EM methods for CE, and an investigation of what changes are required in EM methods. The aim is also to identify necessary methodical and technological adaptations of EM for supporting the transition of enterprises to CE.

 In the interdisciplinary work of computer scientists and mechanical engineers on integrating IT components into physical products and creating prod-ucts-services-systems, we observed that design and development processes cross-cutting the traditional boundaries of disciplines reveal unexpected differences in seemingly easy-to-define and understood terminology. More concretely, at first glance, the terms module and interface have the same meaning in both disci-plines. Still, substantial differences became apparent when implementing design and development processes for products that extend a traditional physical product by IT-controlled functionality and customer services. Motivated by an example of quantified product design, this paper analyses commonalities and differences between the meaning of module and interface in the involved disciplines. We propose an integrative definition with the term "interface" in its focus.

A simplified variant of Set-Based Design (SBD) was created and combined with creative methods such as the 6-3-5 method and the gallery method. This made it easy to introduce in one day, which has been verified by tests in industrial firms. In total 45 experienced designers have tested the method on real mechanical design problems. The method was perceived easy to understand and was well received by the designers. The introduction of it was less cumbersome compared to the full version of SBD. The conclusion is that the developed method makes it easier to introduce parts of SBD with good results.