Organizing the fragmented landscape of multidisciplinary product development: a mapping of approaches, processes, methods and tools from the scientific literature

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution is shaping a new industrial landscape. A variety of technologies related to software, information and communication technologies embody a ubiquitous digital and connectivity era. These technologies enable the creation of new products with the integration of connectivity, data collection and processing capacities which require combining engineering disciplines. Increasing product multidisciplinarity compels companies to adapt their product development practices. The scientific literature offers a variety of concepts and techniques to support multidisciplinary product development. This paper seeks to organize the landscape of concepts and techniques available for multidisciplinary product development. An extensive literature review was conducted, and 236 concepts and techniques were identified. Multidisciplinary products of interest deal with both software and hardware development and can be encountered through the denominations of cyber-physical systems, mechatronics and smart products and systems. An in-depth analysis led to the classification and mapping, for each product denomination, of the concepts and techniques available to support their development. The classification relies on a four-level model paired with a decision tree to thoroughly sort the variety of concepts and techniques into the approach, process, method, and tool levels. The mapping between the sorted concepts and techniques enabled the generation of graphical representations called cartographies. These cartographies serve to support companies’ transformation towards the fourth industrial revolution from the product development perspective by giving a general overview of the related literature, and guiding them in the identification of the most suitable approaches, processes, methods and tools.