Product first, manufacturing system second. While manufacturing companies in fact make their profits by selling products, the successful development and proper functioning of both the product and the manufacturing system need to be ensured. This consideration poses a challenge that must be met in a joint effort because the product and the manufacturing system are two technical systems that mutually affect each other. They do so not only inside the factory building, but also on the drawing board, before their final design is determined.
With an emphasis on the mutual effect between the manufacturing system and the product, this thesis addresses the co-development of the two technical systems. It follows the idea of conducting development based on a strategy for managing change and variety, called platform. Rather than just regarding the reuse of physical parts, the thesis considers a platform approach that involves the definition of generic resources, such as systems, interfaces, and functions. The approach allows for the description of products and manufacturing systems with information about how they may change to produce variety and enable flexibility.
Based on several industrial studies, the thesis explores how platforms can be devised for products, manufacturing systems, or both. It elaborates on how technical systems can be described for defining such platforms. Specifically, it proposes an integrated model that combines function-means trees, component structures, manufacturing operations, and their interactions. The model allows defining platforms that can be expanded over time and used continually to derive product and manufacturing system variants. Thus, it helps manage change and variety in products and manufacturing systems.

https://publications.lib.chalmers.se/records/fulltext/186824/186824.pdf

Co-Development of Products and Manufacturing Systems Using Integrated Platform Models

For manufacturing companies active on the global market, high-performance production systems that contribute to the growth and competitiveness of the company are essential. Among a wide range of in ...

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Management of design information in the production system design process

Given the latest progress in research and technology, achieving the seamless co-development of products and manufacturing systems seems rather undemanding. While a straightforward solution to this challenge is not in fact in sight, numerous ideas exist and are being pursued, both in industry and academia. One of these is to base the development of products and manufacturing systems on strategically specified and pre-defined platforms that limit the solution space in a well-defined manner while allocating desired flexibility. This paper identifies different paradigms for the joint development of products and manufacturing systems. Specifically, it looks at a platform concept originating from manufacturing rather than product design. A real-life industrial example of a robotized manufacturing station from the automotive industry illustrates a transition towards the closer integration of design and manufacturing. In this example, the existing dedicated welding station is contrasted with a modular, configurable station that can accommodate new products and different manufacturing technologies. Differences in flexibility and complexity between these two manufacturing stations are brought to light by modeling the rationale of their designs. From this process, conclusions are drawn regarding the different conditions for co-development with the two manufacturing stations. The modular concept imposes new restrictions. However, with its high degree of configurability, it can be a standard solution for the robotized manufacture of body-in-white sub-assemblies.

Platform Approaches in Manufacturing: Considering Integration With Product Platforms

In early conceptual design the design team is working in an uncertain situation, where the understanding of a need is limited and not much is known about the solution space. In this situation the design team has to both analyse need and explore solution space. Thus, the team has to formulate design specifications, which express attractive product goals, and has to synthesise the product idea. The authors of this paper see a challenge to enhance and improve our understanding of the nature of design specifications as a means to support the synthesis of a product idea. In this empirical study we analyse the structure and content of design specifications during early ideation activities, where initial design specifications are formulated and a product idea is synthesised. We have analysed specification documents of 19 teams of novice designers. Our analysis indicates that a productive product design specification in early conceptual design consists of few specification statements, which express value, important aspects of product context and articulate key functions. A product design specification, which contains a lot of specification statements about product properties, is not productive to support the synthesis of a product idea.

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Specifications in early conceptual design work

One key to efficient and effective reuse in product-developing companies is platform-based design. Future platforms need to more efficiently deal with: concurrency, information-rich designs and fast realization of design derivates. This calls for new ways to describe platform-based designs. The configurable component framework is intended to support concurrent, complex, and variant-rich system design considering the complete product life cycle. This article presents case studies where an extended function-means model, acting as a design rationale, is incorporated into the configurable component concept. This includes an adaptation to handle design bandwidth, a more transparent and explicit constraint handling, and the composition of a system design rationale based on multiple function-means models. This approach enables the description of complex, encapsulated configurable systems composed using multiple (sub) systems and supports concurrent engineering in a supply chain.

Design rationale and system description aspects in product platform design: Focusing reuse in the design lifecycle phase

Product development is in many respects the process of identifying and envisaging needs and bringing those needs into life. To make it challenging, the competition forces companies to continuously reduce development and manufacturing cost while increasing customer satisfaction. As part of this process, large and complex development organisations, with numerous ongoing development projects and outsourced development activities, are faced with the challenge to continuously communicate purposes, goals, and requirements to all involved actors. Furthermore, reflecting on the product and collaboration complexity, it is obvious that concept work becomes more important in order to develop a purposeful requirements specification and well-balanced concept for the continuing project. Reflecting these challenges this research work, containing both descriptive and prescriptive elements, aim to bring forward knowledge and experiences regarding requirements management in practice, and to transform this understanding into better requirements and product models, involving documentation, elaboration, and communication of requirement and product descriptions, thus contributing to the development of better design tools. The empirical elements of this research work have shown that the management of requirements in practice is interwoven in the general organisational structures and processes at the automotive manufacturer studied, and that the harmonisation of conflicting aims are a major challenge and opportunity. Contrary to prescriptions in many methodologies it is evident that requirements are changed, added, and reprioritised throughout projects, mainly due to conflicts, infeasibilities, changed pre-requisites, and the knowledge gained through the development work. Prescriptively, this research work has developed a framework, based on the Theory of Domains, that relates requirements and design intentions to a constitutive product model letting requirements and design solutions co-evolve. More specifically, this research work has contributed to a product model that lets designers explore an envisaged product in a means-end space (from requirements to satisfying product descriptions) as well as a whole-part space (from complete product to individual components). Most importantly, this research work has argued for how functional representations can act as a framework to elaborate and structure requirements, because they give an abstract view on the design problem. Another empirical finding, central to this research work, is the importance to bring forward underlying rationale underlying requirements and product concepts in order to support communication, decision-making, and knowledge retrieval. Based on this insight a  feature-based  framework to represent design rationale has been introduced in the prescribed requirements and product concept model. The findings presented in this thesis take to a large extent a design perspective on requirements management and concept development, but also incorporates elements from manufacturing engineering.

Fredrik Andersson

Papers

The Dynamics of Requirements and Product Concept Management A Product Modelling Approach