Showing papers on "Product design specification published in 2016"

Product Platform And Product Family Design Methods And Applications

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Multi-agent system to support decision-making process in design for recycling

Abstract: In this paper, the application of multi-agent system to support decision-making process in design for recycling is presented. The design for recycling term is highlighted either as the design problem or from the point of view of regulations. The structure of agent system supporting the designer during the design process is showed. The basis of special kind of product model, that is the extension of standard 3D product model, called recycling-oriented product model, is described. The example results of analysis, based on real household appliance model, are presented.

A new conceptual design method to support rapid and effective mapping from product design specification to concept design

Abstract: Conceptual design has a decisive impact on the product development time, cost and success. This paper presents a new conceptual design method for achieving rapid and effective mapping from product design specification (PDS) to concept design. This method can guide the creation of reasonable mapping among the PDS, behaviour parameters and structure parameters and to evaluate the rationality of performance parameters and structure parameters to confirm a reasonable conceptual design scheme. In this method, we establish a PDS-behaviour-structure conceptual design model to support the conceptual design of multi-disciplinary-oriented complex product system (CoPS) and develop a vector-based mapping tool in this method to support the rapid mapping, and demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness by a case study. This method is not only supportive to realise the automation of a conceptual design process but also helpful to evaluate the conceptual design in the field of engineering design.

Integrating Animation-Based Inspection Into Formal Design Specification Construction for Reliable Software Systems

Abstract: Software design has been well recognized as an important means to achieve high reliability, and formal specification can help enhance the quality of design. However, communications between the designer and the user can become difficult via formal specifications due to the potentially complex mathematical expressions in the specification. This difficulty may lead to the situation where the user may not be closely involved in the process of constructing the specification for quality assurance. To allow formal specification to play more effective roles in software design, we put forward a new approach to deal with this problem in this paper. The approach is characterized by integrating specification animation-based inspection into the process of constructing formal design specifications. We discuss the underlying principle of the approach by explaining how specification animation is utilized as a reading technique for inspection to validate, and then evolve, the current specification towards a satisfactory one. We describe a prototype software tool for the method, and present a case study to show how the method supported by the tool works in practice.

Bi-objective optimization for low-carbon product family design

Abstract: Consumers, industry, and government entities are becoming increasingly concerned about the issue of global warming. With this in mind, manufacturers have begun to develop products with consideration of low-carbon. In recent years, many companies are utilizing product families to satisfy various customer needs with lower costs. However, little research has been conducted on the development of a product family that considers environmental factors. In this paper, a low-carbon product family design that integrates environmental concerns is proposed. To this end, a new method of platform planning is investigated with considerations of cost and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission of a product family simultaneously. In this research, a low-carbon product family design problem is described at first, and then a GHG emission model of product family is established. Furthermore, to support low-carbon product family design, an optimization method is applied to make a significant trade-off between cost and GHG emission to implement a feasible platform planning. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated through a case study. We present a new planning method of product platform, called low-carbon product family design.We establish a bi-objective optimization model that minimizes costs and greenhouse gas emission of a product family.An optimization method is proposed to solve the bi-objective optimization problem.Our case study shows that there is a tradeoff between cost and GHG emission in product platform planning.

A survey of product lifecycle models: towards complex products and service offers

Abstract: Lifecycle thinking is a concept that is used to express a holistic perspective on conventional and extended products, such as Product-Service Systems and Cyber-Physical Systems. Many authors of academic literature make use of this concept by defining or reusing product lifecycle models. Those models express how products are designed, produced, delivered, used, maintained and finally recycled or disposed of. The goal of this paper is to describe differences between lifecycle models, in order to clarify how heterogeneous the models are. A selection of 71 visual models was extracted from literature and analysed. The analysis addresses the preferences in modelling based on paper context, geometric topology of models, and the number of lifecycles contained in a single representation of the product lifecycle. The outlook of this paper suggests topics for future research, such as covering multiple lifecycles at once and discussing whether lifecycle models should be expressed with a common language.

Quantifying the Impact of Sustainable Product Design Decisions in the Early Design Phase Through Machine Learning

Abstract: As more companies and researchers become interested in understanding the relationship between product design decisions and eventual environmental impact, proposed methods have explored meeting this demand. However, there are currently limited methods available for use in the early design phase to help quantify the environmental impact of making design decisions. Current methods, primarily vetted Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods, require the designer to wait until later in the design phase, when a product's design is more defined; alternatively, designers are resigned to relying on prior sustainable design experience and empirical knowledge. There is a clear need to develop methods that quantitatively inform designers of the environmental impact of design decisions during the early design phase (particularly during concept generation), as this allows for reexamination of decisions before they become costly or time-intensive to change. The current work builds on previous research involving the development of a search tree of sustainable design knowledge, which, applied during the early design phase, helps designers hone in on the impact of product design decisions. To assist in quantifying the impact of these design decisions, the current work explores the development of a weighting system associated with each potential design decision. The work presented in this paper aims to quantify the general environmental impact potential design decisions have on a consumer product, by using a multi-layer perceptron neural network with back propagation training—a method of machine learning—to relate the life-cycle assessment impact of 37 case study products to product attributes. By defining the relationship between LCA data and product attributes, designers in the early design phase will be more informed of which product attributes have the largest environmental impact, such that the designer can redesign the product to have reduce this impact. Proceedings of the ASME 2016 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2016 August 21-24, 2016, Charlotte, North Carolina

Automatic generation of design structure matrices through the evolution of product models

Abstract: Dealing with component interactions and dependencies remains a core and fundamental aspect of engineering, where conflicts and constraints are solved on an almost daily basis. Failure to consider these interactions and dependencies can lead to costly overruns, failure to meet requirements, and lengthy redesigns. Thus, the management and monitoring of these dependencies remains a crucial activity in engineering projects and is becoming ever more challenging with the increase in the number of components, component interactions, and component dependencies, in both a structural and a functional sense. For these reasons, tools and methods to support the identification and monitoring of component interactions and dependencies continues to be an active area of research. In particular, design structure matrices (DSMs) have been extensively applied to identify and visualize product and organizational architectures across a number of engineering disciplines. However, the process of generating these DSMs has primarily used surveys, structured interviews, and/or meetings with engineers. As a consequence, there is a high cost associated with engineers' time alongside the requirement to continually update the DSM structure as a product develops. It follows that the proposition of this paper is to investigate whether an automated and continuously evolving DSM can be generated by monitoring the changes in the digital models that represent the product. This includes models that are generated from computer-aided design, finite element analysis, and computational fluid dynamics systems. The paper shows that a DSM generated from the changes in the product models corroborates with the product architecture as defined by the engineers and results from previous DSM studies. In addition, further levels of product architecture dependency were also identified. A particular affordance of automatically generating DSMs is the ability to continually generate DSMs throughout the project. This paper demonstrates the opportunity for project managers to monitor emerging product dependencies alongside changes in modes of working between the engineers. The application of this technique could be used to support existing product life cycle change management solutions, cross-company product development, and small to medium enterprises who do not have a product life cycle management solution.

Multi-criteria decision framework for supplier classification in collaborative supply chains: Buyer ' s perspective

Abstract: Purpose – Buyer companies’ engagement with suppliers varies according to their specific business needs. Prior models of supplier classification are based on the dimensions like product specification or criticality of purchase. As the supply chains are embracing collaboration among partners to respond to the dynamic market conditions, it is prudent to study the changes adopted by buyer companies for supplier classification. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – This is an exploratory research for identifying the criteria used for supplier classification based on the interviews of practitioners from buyer multinational manufacturing companies operating in India. The content analysis of the subjective responses led to the identification of distinctive criteria. Findings – Although, many of the practitioners were unaware of the model per se, they labelled their suppliers as per the types stated in the Kraljic model. They mentioned twenty six criteria for supplier classification...

An automated approach to quantifying functional interactions by mining large-scale product specification data

Abstract: The authors of this work hypothesise that the semantic relationship between modules' functional descriptions is correlated with the functional interaction between the modules. A deeper comprehension of the functional interactions between modules enables designers to integrate complex systems during the early stages of the product design process. Existing approaches that measure functional interactions between modules rely on the manual provision of designers' expert analyses, which may be time consuming and costly. The increased quantity and complexity of products in the twenty-first century further exacerbates these challenges. This work proposes an approach to automatically quantify the functional interactions between modules, based on their textual technical descriptions. Compared with manual analyses by design experts who use traditional design structure matrix approaches, the text-mining-driven methodology discovers similar functional interactions, while maintaining comparable accuracies. The...

An integrated closed-loop product lifecycle management approach for reverse logistics design

Abstract: Nowadays, reverse logistics is gaining importance for many companies in different industries. This importance is rooted in the fact that it generates profit and decreases the environmental impacts of products. Even though the decrease of environmental impacts is an indispensable requisite, reverse logistics design is only driven by cost indicators. The main reason behind this high cost is access to environmental information is difficult and is directly linked to data all along the lifecycle of the product. This paper presents a method by which reverse logistics design integrates environmental impacts based on the management of closed-loop product lifecycle. This method is divided into two processes: from beginning of life to end of life and from end of life to beginning of life. The first process integrates product data in order to calculate environmental impacts of the potential reverse logistics networks, whereas the second process selects the most appropriate reverse logistics network before op...

Optimal tolerance design of product based on service quality loss

Abstract: Design tolerance has tremendous influence on both manufacturing cost and quality of a product. The purpose of the paper is to propose a new way of the product optimal tolerance design based on service quality, which is more realistic because the service quality loss model describes the present worth model of quality loss based on the service life distribution, and expresses an actual loss that a product imparts on society after the product is put into service by considering the parts processing equipment during product manufacturing process, operating environment, and lubrication condition during product service. However, many scholars consider manufacturing cost and quality loss for the optimal tolerance design of product at present, in which uses Taguchi quality loss model or Teran quality loss model. The former reflects the forecast of a loss that a product may bring to the society on the time node before it leaves the factory. Although the latter involves the changes of the product quality characteristics after the product is put into service, but its essence is to transform the product quality loss in a certain service life into the present worth on the time node before the product is put into service, and it is still the forecast of a loss for the society, and has many shortages that it takes quality loss cost as cash flow and service life as a certain value. So the proposed way can extend the product tolerance design from the manufacturing stage to the service stage, and enriches the theory of the product optimal tolerance design.

Product life cycle management approach for integration of engineering design and life cycle engineering

Abstract: Optimized lightweight manufacturing of parts is crucial for automotive and aeronautical industries in order to stay competitive and to reduce costs and fuel consumption. Hence, aluminum becomes an unquestionable material choice regarding these challenges. Nevertheless, using only virgin aluminum is not satisfactory because its extraction requires high use of energy and effort, and its manufacturing has high environmental impact. For these reasons, the use of recycled aluminum alloys is recommended considering their properties meet the expected technical and environmental added values. This requires complete reengineering of the classical life cycle of aluminum-based products and the collaboration practices in the global supply chain. The results from several interdependent disciplines all need to be taken into account for a global product/process optimization. Toward achieving this, a method for sustainability assessment integration into product life cycle management and a platform for life cycle simulation integrating environmental concerns are proposed in this paper. The platform may be used as a decision support system in the early product design phase by simulating the life cycle of a product (from material selection to production and recycling phases) and calculating its impact on the environment.

Efficient management of product lifecycle information through a semantic platform

Abstract: Products generate a large amount of information during their lifecycle. Small and medium enterprises often lack an efficient management of such an amount of information. Several tools of product lifecycle management have been developed in the last years to address this issue, but they are rarely exploited by companies, especially SMEs. The aim of our work is to present a semantic platform to integrate data along the whole product lifecycle to allow semantic search and knowledge reuse. The integration of data is realised with a reference PLM ontology, containing the main concepts and relations to describe a PLM. This ontology has a modular structure, so that it can be easily extended to describe concrete product lifecycles. An example of a real application of the semantic platform in an industrial case is reported.

Product design pattern based on big data-driven scenario

Abstract: This article discusses about new product design patterns in the big data era, gives designer a new rational thinking way, and is a new way to understand the design of the product. Based on the key ...