Integrated Product Design Research Articles

Experience design and artefacts after the fact

In this paper the authors discuss a new interdisciplinary project which integrates product design innovations from IDEO, in particular experience prototyping, and touches upon aspects of Eddie Obeng's design paradigms such as fog and quest. The project, ‘Artefact after the Fact’ weaves experience design directly into a New York study trip, which is then further developed by interdisciplinary student teams within a neutral studio space. The authors describe this process, involving 120 students from 5 design disciplines with a staff team with expertise ranging from Product to Interiors, and with contextual input from the School of Architecture, Design History Theory & Practice. Mediating artefacts (convenient shorthand for ‘product’ objects, as experiential metaphors for process and product) are explored, which may be relevant to engineering students, or other ‘non’ product disciplines. As educators, there is much we can learn from industry, but much we need to be wary of within design education; modular inflexibility, reduced teaching time, and a growing obsession with grades collectively threaten the kind of ‘connected’, ‘holistic’ and experimental ‘experiential learning’ which institutions exist to foster, industry demands, and learners need. Interdisciplinary learning echoes those types of product innovations and collaborative and critical team working valued in the creative industries, and in this context, is a means of exploring the changing nature of product design (the experience economy rather than just the object economy). Interdisciplinarity lets us tentatively cross, and challenge, imaginary disciplinary boundaries, and in sharing our imaginations we transform our horizons.

Concepts of design for manufacturing (DFM) of lost wax parts

Integrated Product Design uses several methodologies, Design for Manufacturing is one of them. DFM pretends to facilitate manufacturing of parts by means of analysis of geometries, values and tolerances, and is used in first design stages in order to decrease the product cost. The design for manufacturing was studied as well as design rules to propose a methodology for Design for Investment Casting.

Ergonomics: Leadership during the Product Design Process

On a relatively short 2-hour flight to attend focus groups for a new project, my thoughts and feelings flowed out of my mind through my fingertips into these series of chapters. I was traveling with colleagues — some new to the product design process — and the same issues between designers,1 ergonomists,2 and product planners3 and their integrated product design process appeared again, as they had in past projects. Based on experience of shipping many, many products, I had assembled these rules of thumb about cocreation between ergonomists, designers and project team during product design process. The continuous need to transfer knowledge is essential to timely success of a distinct, valuable, useful, desirable, and usable product. Likewise, sharing these ideas on design process would also create opportunity to prompt discussion among teams composed of ergonomists and designers about the design process, leadership, and vision. I trust the ideas presented forthcoming will spark some thinking on the readers' end as well.

A case study of product modularization on supply chain design and coordination in Hong Kong and China

PurposeModular product design is a practice manufacturers frequently adopt to develop new products. Some literature has reported the importance of the modular product design and its effect on supply chain management. However, until now, very few empirical researches have examined the relationship of product modularisation and supply chain design and coordination. Furthermore, the exploration on how manufacturers capitalize upon product modularization with supply chain design and coordination is rarely reported. This paper addresses this gap.Design/methodology/approachThis paper conducted a case study to review the experience of an Audio Consumer Electronics Manufacturer (ACEM) in Hong Kong and China. This company has successfully integrated modular product design with supply chain design and coordination for more than five years.FindingsResults indicate that product modularization affects supply chain design, whereas product innovation influences on supply chain coordination.Originality/valueThis study explores new relationships between supply chain and modular product design into three propositions for further studies. The first proposition shows that supply chain for modular product design has one more level than integrated product design in multiple‐tier supply chain. The second proposition shows that, regardless of either a modular or integrated product, an innovative product requires closer supply chain coordination than a conventional product in new product development. The final proposition shows that product modularization with close supply chain design and coordination brings down the inventory level, improve the quality of conformance and reduce development lead time.

A CIMOSA presentation of an integrated product design review framework

Integrating subsystems of manufacturing processes, material flow, organization and information to form a manufacturing system is vital to a smooth and responsive operation in the dynamic market. This article presents an integrated system framework for product design optimization in terms of cost, quality and reliability considerations, which are mapped onto the computer integrated manufacture – open system architecture (CIMOSA). The authors employ quality function deployment (QFD), value engineering (VE) and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) as part of a structured and targeted campaign to achieve quality, cost and reliability deployment objectives. The outcome facilitates the product design and development team to consider tradeoffs among the conflicts from customer attributes as well as the inherent fuzziness in the system.

View Through the Door of the SOFIA Project

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and Deutsches Zentrum Mir Luft- und Raumfahrt e.V. (DLR) are working together to create a Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) based on a modified Boeing 747-SP aircraft. One of the key elements of the modification is a new door system that protects the 2.5 meter infrared telescope during flight by covering the aircraft cavity within which the telescope resides. The door system follows the telescope's motion to provide an unvignetted view of the sky, while reducing turbulence inside the cavity. This paper describes the value added by a productive interaction of reliability engineering with the integrated product design team at NASA Ames Research Center that was responsible for the design of this "cavity door" system. The intent of this paper is to describe the interaction with the design team, to point out key reliability improvement strategies applied to the cavity door system, and to offer a few principles to guide interaction of reliability engineers with a design team. It is shown, for example, that significant assistance to improve reliability is achievable with a thorough, detailed understanding of the system's intent, and an organized approach to how it might fail to carry-out its intent. The specifics of the analyses performed are briefly summarized, but the paper emphasizes the key insights that were gained into the reliability of the system.

An Internet-based integrated product design environment. Part I: a hybrid agent and network architecture

During the past two decades, concurrent or collaborative engineering (CE) has presented new possibilities for successful product development. In addition, the advances in computer networks and information technology have brought engineering design context into a new era. As a promising approach to accommodate the radical pace of changes in the context of engineering design, agent technologies have been attracting public attention and are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications. However, little attention has been paid to multi-agent system (MAS) frameworks for CE environments that enable systematic and timely design integrations in both hierarchical and heterarchical design topology. This is the first of a two-part paper proposing a MAS framework for integrated product design in a computer network-oriented CE environment. Part I first proposes a hybrid agent network architecture to develop lightweight, dynamic and large-scale distributed systems, and then proposes a hybrid agent architecture based on our finite state automata (FSA) formalism that can exhibit both hybrid behaviours and hybrid interactions. Finally, some ideas for building an integrated product design environment are presented using the proposed agent and network architecture. Part II discusses the applications of the proposed MAS framework to concurrent engineering design.

An Internet-based integrated product design environment. Part II: its applications to concurrent engineering design

Concurrent or collaborative engineering (CE) has inspired research in the area of design decomposition, which facilitates the concurrency of product lifecycle functions from the earlier stage of the product development process and reduces the complexity of a design problem. The decomposition-based design, on the other hand, necessitates various integration efforts for recombining the decomposed design problems. This is the second of a two-part paper proposing a multi-agent system (MAS) framework for integrated product design in a computer network-oriented CE environment. Part II discusses the applications of the proposed MAS framework to concurrent engineering design. The proposed framework realises the systematic and timely design integrations between multi-functional/cross-functional team members in a dynamic design environment, by enabling model integration, solution integration and tool integration. The proposed design agents make the problem-specific engineering models or heterogeneous design tools interoperable and network-accessible, and also provide the interaction spaces for communicating, integrating or coordinating the individual design solutions. Throughout the paper, the proposed system is illustrated with a successful implementation of a continuously variable transmission (CVT) design problem over the Internet .

A novel approach in integrating product design into curriculum: Toy and entertainment animatron design

This paper presents a novel approach in integrating the product development process into curriculum by utilizing the complex toy and entertainment development areas. A cross-disciplinary course targeting engineering, technology, and art students was designed and offered to accomplish animatronic toy development and entertainment job-shop practices within educational settings. The curriculum was comprised of the following content in the following sequence: introduction to product design, project management and team-work basics, concept development, artistic and industrial design, material and manufacturing process selection, mechanism design and assembly, actuators, sensors, controls, and programming. Mini-lessons were complemented by laboratories sessions, leading to an open-ended design project. Analytical tools and visual means such as engineering graphics, videos/animations, or working models were employed to address different learning styles during the mini-lessons.

A New Design for Production (DFP) Methodology with Two Case Studies

Concurrent engineering (CE) design demands the consideration of product life cycle issues in the early product design stage. Among various life cycle issues, this work concentrates on production and how to optimize a product design to minimize its production costs. This paper proposes the use of cost as a measure of the productivity and defines Design for Production (DFP) as methods that lead to a product design with minimum production costs while satisfying all the functional requirements. Based on this definition, this work proposes a DFP methodology. The novelty of this methodology lies on three aspects (1) the use of the Operation-Based Costing (OBC) method to measure productivity, (2) the identification of relations and boundaries between product design and production activities, and (3) the integration of product design, production cost estimation, and metamodeling-based optimization to search for the optimal product design. The proposed DFP methodology has been applied to the optimal design of two industry products, an industrial silencer and a linear air diffuser. The results from these studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, whose assumptions and limitations are also elaborated.

Integrated Product Design Using Rapid Prototyping Technology and Rapid Tooling in Concurrent Engineering Approach

Advancement and acceptance of Concurrent Engineering to speed up and improve product development process requires a systematic approach to the integrated, simultaneous design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support [1] and Rapid Prototyping [2] is the one versatile tool that meet this requirement. Rapid Prototyping involves virtual prototyping and provides physical models as an end product. Traditionally initial industrial design concepts are shown as renderings or drawings, that show the look and feel of the product. The construction of mock up is followed after selection of a particular concept and these looks exactly like final product in true form, colour, texture etc. but without working internal components. With the advancement of CAD, 2 types of prototyping are in use in product design for modeling and simulating products performances. (a) Virtual prototyping using Analytical models (b) Physical prototyping making physical models These choices are influenced by variety of reasons. Physical prototypes are used for Communication purpose, Demonstration purpose, Scheduling /milestones, Feasibility study, Parametric modeling and Architectural interfacing. The above uses lead to a number of benefits such as insights into manufacturability and assemblability, accelerating of parallel activities and flexible product choices. In this paper, we are concerned from the point of view of an industrial designer for Integrated Product Development using concurrent engineering approach. Thus this paper highlights the benefits of Rapid Prototyping over conventional prototyping methods.

Integrated Product Design and Manufacturing Using Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing

Integrated Product Design and Manufacturing Using Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing

Integration of Product Design and Assembly Planning in the Digital Factory

As assembly process planning fulfils the main function of connecting product design to production simulation and thus, the production system itself, a feasible software solution is needed to support this process. Thus, a novel concept is presented that aims at improving the integration of digital product design and assembly planning by introducing a consistent data structuring. This approach helps to reduce redundant tasks and supports the continuous data exchange. It is based on the use of assembly features, i.e. pre-defined geometry elements that contain additional technological information. The prototypical implementation of the concept focuses on the use of commercially available software tools, expanding them with additional functionality for the application of assembly features. The feature-based concept has been tested with a scenario from the automotive supplier industry. For the considered assembly, a comparison between the conventional and the feature-based planning approach is presented in the paper. It points out that the major advantages of the developed concept can be seen in an improved data consistency as well as a higher level of efficiency within the planning activities.

Optimal Parameter and Tolerance Design with a Complete Inspection Plan

The need to remain competitive has led manufacturing sectors to consider tolerances as the key to achieving low cost and high quality. To produce quality products at low cost in today’s manufacturing industry, an integration of product design and process planning is essential. Process tolerance is one of the most important parameters that link product design and process planning. The process mean is also a critical parameter for further quality improvement and cost reduction under the permissible process setting adjustment within design tolerance limits. This study discusses an approach to integrate the product and process design via the optimisation of process mean and process tolerance.

A knowledge intensive multi-agent framework for cooperative/collaborative design modeling and decision support of assemblies

Multi-agent modeling has emerged as a promising discipline for dealing with decision making process in distributed information system applications. One of such applications is the modeling of distributed design or manufacturing processes which can link up various designs or manufacturing processes to form a virtual consortium on a global basis. This paper proposes a novel knowledge intensive multi-agent cooperative/collaborative framework for concurrent intelligent design and assembly planning, which integrates product design, design for assembly, assembly planning, assembly system design, and assembly simulation subjected to econo-technical evaluations. An AI protocol based method is proposed to facilitate the integration of intelligent agents for assembly design, planning, evaluation and simulation process. A unified class of knowledge intensive Petri nets is defined using the O-O knowledge-based Petri net approach and used as an AI protocol for handling both the integration and the negotiation problems among multi-agents. The detailed cooperative/collaborative mechanism and algorithms are given based on the knowledge objects cooperation formalisms. As such, the assembly-oriented design system can easily be implemented under the multi-agent-based knowledge-intensive Petri net framework with concurrent integration of multiple cooperative knowledge sources and software. Thus, product design and assembly planning can be carried out simultaneously and intelligently in an entirely computer-aided concurrent design and assembly planning system.

Partnership Synthesis for Virtual Enterprises

The virtual enterprise (VE) concept is one of the most important ways to raise the agility and competitiveness of a manufacturing enterprise. Under this concept a master company develops its products by using the manufacturing resources of external partners. Thus product design and partner selection or partner synthesis become two important issues. In this paper, we propose an integrated product design and partner synthesis process model, and develop an architecture of computer-aided product design and partner synthesis system for the VE (CAPDPS), in which product design and the partner synthesis module and the respective databases are implemented. Partner synthesis activity, in this paper, is divided into two phases: partner type synthesis and partner instance synthesis. In the partner type synthesis phase, group technology (GT) is applied for retrieving and selecting potential partners. In the partner instance synthesis phase, more factors other than the cost are identified, and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method is employed to select the best partner from the potential ones. A specific automobile manufacturing group (including master company and its partner factories) and its typical product -automobile steering assembly - are used as a case to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach.

Concept Design and Reliability

The paper outlines an approach to concept design that integrates the development of the design specification with multi-objective concept development. ‘Excursions’ are undertaken to explore particular aspects of the design, e.g., reliability, in order to help create a concept that is strong in the salient design requirements. The paper then considers reliability as a principal design requirement. Existing reliability evaluation methods are reviewed with respect to their suitability for use in concept design. The paper then describes an approach, an ‘excursion’, that can be used to improve the reliability of a concept. The reliability excursion comprises a systematic method of evaluation and a reliability analysis toolbox. The research reported is an element of a larger concept design activity that itself forms part of a substantial project on integrated product design undertaken at the Polhem Laboratory, Lulea Technical University, Sweden and at UMIST, UK.

Knowledge-based approach and system for assembly oriented design, Part I: the approach

Assembly is one of the most important stages for product development. Assembly-oriented design (AOD) is a new approach to designing assemblies, which uses a number of design and analysis tools to help the designer plan out and analyze candidate assembly schemes prior to having detailed knowledge of the geometry of the parts. Using this approach, many assembly schemes can be inexpensively evaluated for their ability to deliver the important characteristics of the final product. This research proposes a knowledge-based approach and develops an expert design system to support top-down design for assembled products. The presentation of research report is divided into two parts: the knowledge-based approach (Part I) and the knowledge-based expert design system (Part II). This paper is the first part of the report (Part I), which mainly proposes a knowledge-based approach and framework for intelligent assembly oriented design. The proposed approach focuses on the integration of product design, assemblability analysis and evaluation, and design for assembly with economical analysis. It differs from the existing approaches adopting the part-first bottom-up modeling technique, in which a hybrid model related to design problem-solving including function–behavior–structure model, feature-based geometric model, and parametric constraint model is used as a comprehensive intelligent framework for assembly modeling and design in a top-down manner from the conceptual level to the detailed level. Through the use of intelligent approach and framework, concurrent engineering knowledge can be effectively incorporated into the assembly design process, and a knowledge-based expert design system can be implemented.

System integrated product design, CNC programming and postprocessing for three-axis lathes

New three-axis CNC turning machines have been installed on shop floors of factories in the last few years. Although the machines are still particularly adapted to cylindrical work, they are also used for non-cylindrical machining. The third axis, C or Y, and separately driven, additional milling cutters have eliminated traditional limitations and opened new machining possibilities, i.e. turning and milling the non-rotational shapes. Even the advanced, integrated CAD/CAM systems do not support the milling and turning processes on three-axis CNC lathes or turning centers. Manual part programming for such machine tools, if available, does not facilitate the integration between design and manufacturing. For accurate part programming on three-axis lathes a new interpolation scheme must be applied, using both spiral segments of Archimedes and circular segments rather than linear segments as applied in CNC milling. Specialized, built-in software developed for the three-axis lathes enables to expand CAD/CAM integration to the same extent as in CNC multi-axis milling. The software includes modified postprocessors for three-axis lathes as well. The integrated processes of design and manufacturing are the most important prerequisites for effective concurrent engineering. In general, it means both better economics and quality of complex products, e.g. shaped rolls for rolling operations, cams and camshafts (non-ruled surfaces included), non-rotational shafts, airscrews, prostheses for total hip replacements, etc.

A distributed multi-agent environment for product design and manufacturing planning

This paper describes a multi-agent approach to the integration of product design, manufacturability analysis, and process planning in a distributed manner. The objective is to develop a distributed concurrent engineering system to allow geographically dispersed entities to work cooperatively towards overall system goals. In the paper, an agent-based concurrent engineering system concerning product design and manufacturing planning, and its fundamental framework and functions are presented. The proposed model considers constraints and requirements from the different product development cycles in the early development phases and fully supports the concept of design-for-manufacturability. This methodology uses conflict resolution (CR) techniques and design-improvement suggestions to refine the initial product design. The model comprises a facilitator agent, a console agent and six service agents. Each service agent is used to model different product development phases, and the console agent acts as an interacting interface between designers and the system, while the facilitator is responsible for the decomposition and dispatch of tasks, and resolving conflicts of poor designs. A prototype system for part design, manufacturability analysis, and process planning has been implemented. The performance of the prototype system shows that it could be extended to include other service agents, such as assemblability analysis, to become a comprehensive distributed concurrent engineering system for geographically dispersed customers and suppliers.