Holistic Product Design Research Articles

Triggers for chemical product design: A systematic literature review

AbstractThe product design project is a complex problem because objectives and constraints must be considered simultaneously, the sustainability context is highly relevant and specific, decision‐making involves not only customer needs but also of other stakeholders, especially the organization in which the design project takes place. This work presents a systematic literature review of design methodologies for chemical products to identify how that problem has been addressed and which are the future challenges to be met. The review involved the analysis of 262 research papers and 336 patents, classified according to the chemical product type, the design phase studied, and whether they consider association with a business context. The study highlights the need for holistic product design methodologies applicable from the early design stages, covering the assessment of customer needs and the requirements of other stakeholders, as well as the business context where the design process is carried out.

Adapt! – Agile Project Management Supported by Axiomatic Design

This paper presents a novel approach for the use of Axiomatic Design Theory in combination with agile project management methods like Scrum for an effective, structured and combined product design and development process. Agile project management methods give a guideline how to manage a project, but there is only minor assistance regarding the actual product development process itself. Axiomatic Design can be used to support these methods in this point. In concrete terms, the results of the decomposition process of this theory can be used to formulate and structure the work packages for the agile project managing process. The Independence Axiom of Axiomatic Design Theory has a substantial contribution by ensuring the independence of the work packages which can be assigned to different project team members and can be processed independently by them. The combination of the different methods not only helps to ensure a good design solution but also helps to work more agile within a project team. The here proposed approach is one part of a holistic product design and development process for changeable production units – called Adapt! – and is described within a use case in the automotive sector.

Holistic Product Analysis within Technological Changes, as Instrument for Product Sustainability Improvement

The presented research approach is oriented toward the general problem of industrial products sustainability and the idea of extending the product maturity stage within the Product Lifecycle is more specifically targeted. As strategic solution in this sense, the intervention in later stages of product lifecycle and not only in early stages of product development is proposed. More particularly, a holistic product analysis upon such technological changes, as valuable instrument for product sustainability improvement, is subjected to study in the paper. Béhars principles for Holistic Product Design are translated as criteria for alternative product analysis within the research approach. As case study, the paper solves the problem of a comparative holistic analysis upon two industrial technologies for some particular automotive spare part, respectively for two clutch housing solutions. The two analyzed technologies consider, as first variant, the clutch housing manufactured as single body part machined from a cast aluminium alloy blank and as replacing variant, the clutch housing manufactured as assembled product from a formed sheet metal cover and three machined aluminium alloy segments. An economic efficiency analysis and a LCIA approach with the evaluation of the EI99 scores have been also developed for the considered technological change process and the obtained results are included in the paper. Finally, some adequate conclusions of the research approach are presented, oriented mainly in the direction of the impact of the technological changes upon the product sustainability improvement, criteria such as producer economic vitality, environment damage or social impact being discussed.

A holistic product design and analysis model and its application in railway vehicle systems design

For complex mechanical systems, to overcome design inconsistencies, it is becoming more and more necessary that product design system is effectively integrated with various analysis models and tools from multiple engineering domains at different design stages. In this article, a Holistic Product Design and Analysis Model, which is well supported by Top–Down design method, is conceptualized to define design and analysis integration at different levels, which will help enhance engineering design and analysis interoperability and integrate the design methods and analysis tools across multiple engineering domains. It is based on four design levels: system, subsystem, machine and component designs; at each level, design and analysis models are integrated under a Generalized Multirepresentation Architecture supporting design, analysis and optimization appropriately. For cross-level integration from top to bottom, the design models are transferred and mapped with more structural and geometric details, while analysis models obtain more detailed design constraints from the top levels. This new architecture has been developed and demonstrated with an application in a railway vehicle system design, although its optimization components have not been fully implemented. This model can be used for general mechanical product system design.