Agile Product Development—coupling explorative and established CAx methods in Early Stages of Virtual Product Development

Abstract

Companies are reacting to shorter development cycles and individual customer requests by implementing agile project management such as Design Thinking, Scrum or Lean Startup. They assume that this leads to early customer feedback, prompt response to changes and collaboration across departments for efficient product success through continuous cooperation of all participants. But how can classical development processes be adapted or redesigned to become (more) agile? Which possibilities are available to product developers and designers to use methods - especially regarding CAx - in a useful and agile way? Over the past decades, numerous tools have been developed and are used by experts for specific problems. In the meantime, products can be represented as digital twins at a very high level. Currently, coupling or even merging of specific methods and tools is recognizable and necessary so that further potentials can be tapped. In many cases, this means that non-experts may come into contact with very special and complex methods and tools, which brings intuitive handling and validation of results into focus. This paper focuses on the following questions: What are suitable methods, tools and procedures, especially in agile development environments, and how can they be used? Different agile and explorative methods, tools and procedures within the CAx domain are coupled on selected scientific and industrial use cases. The process chain is then applied in the early phase of product development, in which requirements and boundary conditions are still vague, but initial knowledge about the later product already needs to be gainedif possible directly with the customer. The aim is to generate stimulating insights and iteratively generate validated models even when the product is not yet fully specified. For an agile and explorative process chain, we use 3d scanning for generating patient specific exoskeletons, hybrid CAD software for bionic and efficient modeling for Additive Manufacturing, 3d sketching for rough DMU sketches and prototype tooling to produce prototype series. The findings are then prepared for further use in common environments such as CAD for finalizing the product.