As companies strive to develop artefacts intended for services instead of traditional sell-off, new challenges in the product development process arise to promote continuous improvement and increasing market profits. This creates a focus on product life-cycle components as companies then make life-cycle commitments, where they are responsible for the function availability during the extent of the life-cycle, i.e. functional products. One of these life-cycle components is manufacturing; therefore, companies search for new approaches of success during manufacturability evaluation already in engineering design. Efforts have been done to support early engineering design, as this phase sets constraints and opportunities for manufacturing. These efforts have turned into design for manufacturing methods and guidelines. A further step to improve the life-cycle focus during early engineering design is to reuse results and use experience from earlier projects. However, because results and experiences created during project work are often not documented for reuse, only remembered by some people, there is a need for design support. Knowledge engineering (KE) is a methodology for creating knowledge-based systems, e.g. systems that enable reuse of earlier results and make available both explicit and tacit corporate knowledge, enabling the automated generation and evaluation of new engineering design solutions during early product development. There are a variety of KE-approaches, such as knowledge-based engineering, case-based reasoning and programming, which have been used in research to develop design for manufacturing methods and applications. There are, however, opportunities for research where several approaches and their interdependencies, to create a transparent picture of how KE can be used to support engineering design, are investigated. The aim of the research presented in this thesis is to create new methods for design for manufacturing, by using several approaches of KE, and find the beneficial and less beneficial aspects of these methods in comparison to each other and earlier research. This thesis presents methods and applications for design for manufacturing using KE. KE has been employed in several ways, namely rule-based, rule-, programmingand finite element analysis (FEA)-based, and ruleand plan-based, which are tested and compared with each other. Results show that KE can be used to generate information about manufacturing in several ways. The rule-based way is suitable for supporting life-cycle commitments, as engineering design and manufacturing can be integrated with maintenance and performance predictions during early engineering design, though limited to the firing of production rules. The rule-, programmingand FEA-based way can be used to integrate computer-aided design tools and virtual manufacturing for non-linear stress and displacement analysis. This way may also bridge the gap between engineering designers and computational experts, even though this way requires a larger effort to program than the rule-based. The ruleand planbased way can enable design for manufacturing in two fashions – based on earlier manufacturing plans and based on rules. Because earlier manufacturing plans, together with programming algorithms, can handle knowledge that may be more intricate to capture as rules, as opposed to the time demanding routine work that is often automated by means of rules, several opportunities for designing for manufacturing exist.

Methods and Applications

Spectral kurtosis for fault detection, diagnosis and prognostics of rotating machines: A review with applications

Comparison of two new ARIMA-ANN and ARIMA-Kalman hybrid methods for wind speed prediction

Requirement of green supply with higher quality has been consumers’ demand around the globe The electrical power system is expected to deliver undistorted sinusoidal rated voltage and current continuously at rated frequency to the consumers This paper presents a comprehensive review of signal processing and intelligent techniques for automatic classification of the power quality (PQ) events and an effect of noise on detection and classification of disturbances It is intended to provide a wide spectrum on the status of detection and classification of PQ disturbances as well as an effect of noise on detection and classification of PQ events to the researchers, designers and engineers working on power quality More than 150 research publications on detection and classification techniques of PQ disturbances have been critically examined, classified and listed for quick reference

A critical review of detection and classification of power quality events

A Survey of Artificial Neural Network in Wind Energy Systems

Weather forecasts for microgrid energy management: Review, discussion and recommendations

A novel virtual instrument for power quality surveillance based in higher-order statistics and case-based reasoning

Characterization of electrical sags and swells using higher-order statistical estimators

A novel neural network method for wind speed forecasting using exogenous measurements from agriculture stations

An application of the spectral kurtosis to characterize power quality events

Agustín Agüera-Pérez

Papers

Weather forecasts for microgrid energy management: Review, discussion and recommendations

A novel virtual instrument for power quality surveillance based in higher-order statistics and case-based reasoning

Characterization of electrical sags and swells using higher-order statistical estimators

A novel neural network method for wind speed forecasting using exogenous measurements from agriculture stations

An application of the spectral kurtosis to characterize power quality events