The circular economy (CE) is an economic philosophy aimed at eliminating waste and the continual use of resources. It emphasizes designing products for longevity, reuse, and recycling to create a closed-loop system. One of the goals of enterprise modeling (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 CE, a meta-model preparing the product perspective in EM methods for CE, a QFD-based method component guiding the translation of CE goals to product properties and modules, and an investigation of what changes are required in EM methods. The work uses real-world case studies to motivate the research, identify requirements, and evaluate the findings.

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.

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.

Product portfolio and long-term predictions are required to develop production lines. However, the predictions are influenced by changing customer needs, regulations, geopolitical issues and circular strategies. Production lines are expensive, and both product and production systems should be designed for planned and unplanned changes. Production Feature Asset and a method to use these are proposed where production requirements are embodied at the interface of product-production systems. Production Feature Asset supports continuous collaboration between the product and production development domains by providing product artefacts that are purposely designed to facilitate production, enabling reuse of production lines and sustainability knowledge.

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. 

In product platforms, reusable assets play an important role in supporting the realization of new products and systems. Asset governance is key to ensure their relevance and useability. Assets can have different aims for different stakeholders, where design engineers might use design guidelines as platform assets within their organizational function, while other assets aim to support transdisciplinary collaboration, such as the production preparation process. Although assets used within functions have received previous attention, the literature has not yet presented a clear path forward for how the transdisciplinary perspective on platform asset governance can be supported. To shed light on this topic, we therefore introduce the concept of Transdisciplinary Platform Assets. We do this by conceptualizing these Transdisciplinary Platform Assets from a boundary object perspective. Boundary objects can enable transdisciplinary collaboration and integration of knowledge across diverse communities. By viewing assets from a boundary object perspective, we can illuminate how assets can be tailored for transdisciplinary usage; subsequently becoming more effective. In this paper we put forward a way to classify assets based on the width of the transdisciplinary gap between the users. The concept is further illuminated in its implications through an illustrative discussion on A3 templates. We conclude by highlighting potential paths for future research and potential industrial use cases.

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.

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.

 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.

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.