Despite advances in digital engineering tools, early-stage sheet metal forming tooling design remains strongly dependent on the tacit knowledge of experienced engineers, making systematic knowledge reuse difficult. This study addresses the need for a structured method to capture, organize, retrieve, and reuse historical tooling knowledge during early design decision-making. A data-driven decision-support framework is proposed, in which previous tooling projects are represented as structured knowledge cases containing CAD-derived features and performance-related data. The framework is developed within a Case-Based Reasoning paradigm and consists of three modules: a Difficulty Assessment Module for estimating manufacturing difficulty, a Similarity Retrieval Module for identifying comparable historical cases, and a Performance Module for linking design decisions with maintenance and operational outcomes. A prototype implementation was developed, tested, and evaluated through expert validation workshops with industrial tooling partners. The results indicate that the proposed framework has the potential to support more interpretable and systematic early-stage tooling decisions by formalizing design knowledge and enabling the retrieval of relevant past cases. The study concludes that data-driven knowledge reuse can reduce reliance on individual experience, may potentially reduce the design lead time, and support early design stages.

Product realisation process in industrialised house building is often characterized with Engineer-to-order production strategy (ETO). In ETO the design phase is a part of every house building project, and it relies on the combination of process predefinitions and product predefinitions. A challenge with the process part, is to identify, allocate, verify and secure requirements throughout the design process. One set of requirements can be traced to Miljöbyggnad, a climate certification system in Sweden, judged from a third-part evaluation of performance for energy, climate, inner and outer environment. Based on indicators the certification has the purpose for house-building companies to reach the goals for a green transition with climate neutral construction processes before 2050. Requirement management becomes a crucial part of the multi-storey housebuilding design phase, where unique layout and other client choices are present in each project. A prerequisite for the systematic requirement management is the definition of underlying information structures. The aim of this study is therefore to identify and describe how information can be structured for systematic management of Miljöbyggnad requirements in an industrialized house building context. In a qualitative study, with two industrialised house building companies, three representative house-building projects where followed, mapped, analysed and identified for analyses. One interesting analysis result from the study was how requirements were broken down along the design phase and how domains could support the work for each house-building project. Practical contribution, in how information standards could support Miljöbyggnad requirements, was identified align with multi-disciplinary roles in the design phase.

The current ways of working with production equipment requirements are often based on reducing throughput times, reducing man-hours, and reducing the number of parts and variants. The design and development of production equipment requirements is often less structured compared to product requirements. Consequently, this requirement definition is commonly driven by requests for quotation to equipment suppliers rather than a formalised internal requirement process and is highly dependent on the immediate need. In this paper, an approach using function means modelling to structure and test production equipment requirements is presented. The aim is to ensure future equipment architectures remain functional, scalable, and adaptable to changing production needs, while enabling solution exploration, decision traceability, and documentation for future reuse. For this reason, theoretical concepts on functional requirements and function-means modelling are used. In an industrial case, the existing practice for defining and structuring production equipment requirements was analysed, and the principles for defining functional requirements and function means modelling were explored. Based on this, a principled approach was developed, tested and evaluated by industry practitioners. The result of this paper is a structured and transparent approach for defining production equipment requirements based on function means modelling to enable both an initial open solution space and the use of predefined concepts with alternative technical solutions. This approach seeks to reduce ambiguity in setting pre-defined requirements, enabling manufacturing companies to work internally in developing systems that are sustainable and competitive throughout their lifecycle.

Industrialized housebuilding (IHB) integrates various constructs to meet customer demands through adaptable product solutions and efficient production processes. Although product platforms are increasingly common in IHB, research addressing platform maintenance remains limited. This study explored the maintenance of strategic product platforms within IHB, focusing on a Swedish company. The study applied the Design Research Methodology (DRM) framework, where this study is positioned in Descriptive Study I. Three data sets were collected to describe the current state, through analysis of design assets, platform maintenance practices, and two development projects. One case, from production, concerned roof hatches, and one case, originating in market demand, investigated window blocks. Data collection included semi-structured interviews and a series of workshops in collaboration with the design department. The results indicate key issues in platform maintenance, including the impact of new requirements on existing systems. Three central platform maintenance challenges were identified: fragmented knowledge management, poor traceability and reuse of special solutions, and difficulties transferring solutions across product lines. The findings from the development projects further demonstrate that alignment between design and production is a critical capability for platform maintenance in IHB.

The manufacturing industry is undergoing a major transformation driven by the need to adopt sustainable and circular practices in product realisation. To manage and evaluate complex transitions, many sectors use maturity models—structured instruments that assess current capabilities and track progress. However, existing instruments rarely integrate both product and production development perspectives. This paper presents the development and application of a holistic maturity instrument tailored to product realisation in manufacturing. We outline its conceptual foundation, assessment criteria, and implementation methodology, and report initial findings from applications across ten manufacturing companies. Results indicate that the integration of sustainability and circularity in product realisation is generally fair, with variation across companies and aspects. Not too surprisingly, perceived knowledge of sustainability was higher than that of circularity among the participating companies. A challenging area appears to be data and information related to sustainability and circularity. Overall, satisfaction with the level of integration of sustainability and circularity aspects in product realisation among the participating companies was mainly neutral, neither dissatisfied nor satisfied. Beyond assessing maturity levels, the instrument fosters reflection and engagement, supporting the complex transition. We argue that the instrument has potential as a boundary object, facilitating dialogue, shared understanding, and collaboration across organisational functions and stakeholders.

Conventional research typically adheres to established disciplinary methodologies, whereas transdisciplinary research demands a more flexible and adaptable approach. This paper presents and discusses a work procedure developed and successfully implemented to support collaboration and progress in a large-scale 4-year research project. The work procedure integrates the overall principles from interactive research with the structure of the design research methodology (DRM) framework. The focus here is on the potential of the developed work procedure to support transdisciplinary engineering research. We specifically investigate to what degree the requirements of relevant transdisciplinary research processes are met, i.e., the ability to a) understand and manage complexity, b) incorporate diverse perspectives, c) link abstract and practice-oriented knowledge for implementation and d) develop descriptive, normative, and practical knowledge. Several principles essential to fulfilling the requirements and succeeding with transdisciplinary research were encouraged and supported. Therefore, integrating knowledge from collaborative research, industry-academia partnerships and engineering design could be a promising strategy to strengthen transdisciplinary engineering research. We propose that the suggested work procedure, together with the identified best practices, could serve as support in this context as a transdisciplinary engineering research framework.

The European Green Deal aims for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, including economic growth decoupled from resource use. Extended product life cycles, new user scenarios, circular manufacturing, and emerging technologies will increase the complexity of products and production systems. At the same time, the potential to implement solutions that support sustainability and circularity in products and production systems is largely determined during the product realisation process. But what do sustainability and circularity imply for product realization in practice? A group of manufacturing industry representatives raised this question, which became the starting point for a series of workshops that mixed different companies and researchers, along with company-specific meetings where core industrial challenges and research issues were identified for a longer timeframe. The discussion with the companies combined with a state-of-the-art review supported the development of four major research themes: 1. requirements management and platform development, 2. product and production information management, 3. product and production development and solutions, and 4. common understanding and knowledge integration.

To successfully integrate sustainability and circularity aspects into the product realisation process, academia and industry need to mobilise. The four themes constitute the foundation for the research agenda in an eight-year research program, GRACE - Green Transition through integrated and platform-enabled product realisation. The scope of these themes and the united industrial and scientific challenges have been defined, resulting in three initial research projects. This work introduces the four themes, the three initial research projects, and the main challenges and expectations among the eleven manufacturing companies participating in the recently started research program.

The need to prevent crossing planetary boundaries has accelerated sustainable product development and production research. This resulted in the introduction of tools and methods to support the development of sustainable products. However, practice is still challenged by changing requirements, regulations, guidelines, and a plethora of tools. This study aims to identify different tools and methods that support transferring sustainability aspects into technical requirements during product and production development through a systematic literature review in Scopus. The search was limited to articles in the engineering, manufacturing sector, and journal or conference publications in the period between 2014 and 2024. Multiple authors were involved in the selection process to avoid bias. 56 articles were selected and analyzed based on purpose, user, production support, and utilization of the requirements management process. Results indicated that good support for product development and design engineers exists, but not for production, product production co-development, and other stakeholders. A need for a requirements management-based method to support the integration of sustainability aspects during product production co-development is identified. A research framework and three research strands are proposed based on this identified need, which will be developed as future work. Exclusion criteria can introduce some limitations, but the review provides an extensive overview of existing methods and gaps.

Sustainable development has necessitated developing processes that consider lifecycles and circularity of products and production systems. There has been much focus and support for product development, but there is a gap in supporting the co-development of product and production systems focusing on sustainability. Requirements management has shown to have the potential to support this co-development. Understanding the current state of practice in working with sustainability aspects and requirements related to product and pro-duction development is essential. This paper presents eight companies’ current state and challenges of working with sustainability aspects and requirements. Data collection was done using forty semi-structured interviews. The study high-lighted the need for systematic support for managing sustainability requirements for product and production development. Based on the findings, a conceptual framework was developed to support identifying stakeholder needs, managing changing sustainability-related regulations, ensuring proper requirement owner-ship, data management, and considering current and future product and production portfolios.

The sheet metal forming tooling industry is a highly specialized area. However, there seem to be similarities in the tasks executed and in the design solutions. This work has investigated what types of data are involved in the various steps in the design and manufacturing of sheet metal tooling in five different tooling firms. By analyzing these different types of data, the study explores possible avenues for employing AI/ML techniques for CBR-enabled knowledge reuse based on legacy data. The paper concludes that adopting AI/ML in knowledge reuse has the potential to significantly improve efficiency and innovation in tooling design and manufacturing.