Product design and engineering

Flexibility has become imperative to face the increasing market demands. Its implementation across the whole product development process is not a trivial task. It requires the introduction of new tools and methods for managing continuous product changes while evaluating in real time their impact in terms of design efforts, manufacturing costs, time to market, etc. The present research work aims at developing a design platform to support the creation, visualization and navigation of a multilevel product representation where functions, modules, assemblies and components are strictly interrelated. The introduction of "Design for X" principles as rules to relate all aspects contributing to product design, allows the evaluation of changes impact at the three levels. The approach and the proposed platform have been applied in the field of refrigerators in order to support both designers and engineers to rapidly configure the optimal design solution in respect with the company requirements formalized by the implemented Design for X rules. © Organizing Committee of TMCE 2010 Symposium.

Keywords: Assessing impact of design changes , Change management tool , Design for X , Supporting functional analysis and modularity

Companies applying mass customization paradigm regard the design process as a configuration task where the solution is achieved through the extraction of a new instance from a modular product structure. In this context product configuration management tools are evermore important. Although tools have been already proposed, they fail in real industrial contexts. Main causes are recognizable in high efforts in systems implementation and lack of flexibility in products updating. This research aims to develop an approach to overcome drawbacks and simplify the implementation and the use of product configuration systems also in redesign activities. The paper initially reviews existing systems in terms of design knowledge representation methods and product structure formalization techniques. Then, an approach based on Configuration Virtual Prototypes which store and manage different levels of knowledge, is presented. In particular, a framework is outlined in order to represent design data and its formalization in configuration tools. Three different domains are managed and connected via Configuration Virtual Prototypes: Product Specifications, Geometrical Data and Product Knowledge. Specifically, geometrical data aspects are analyzed in detail providing approaches for eliciting knowledge introduced by parametric template CAD models. The approach will be exemplified through a real application example where an original tool has been developed on the based of the described method. Benefits of the system will be shown and briefly discussed, in particular in terms of reachable flexibility in solutions. Copyright © by ASME.

Keywords: Design automation , Modularity , Product configuration

Virtual Reality systems can impact on quality of collaboration design processes. In the present work is defined a structured method to classify, qualify and select VR-based tools for supporting co-design activities by adopting a set of benchmarking metrics. Attention is focused on collaboration scopes and requirements, participants' behavior and exploited interaction modalities. The method has been applied to synchronous and remote collaboration that actually represents the most critical communication in industry. Three different types of collaborative VR tools have been investigated and compared. Experimental results highlight how the proposed method is able to identify the main collaboration requirements by selecting the most proper supporting technology and show also the contribution to collaboration success. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.

Keywords: Benchmarking , Collaborative design , Virtual reality

Collaborative design provides creative design solutions and improves product quality as well as enriches participants' knowledge. Nevertheless, design and supply chain integration in product development processes is not a trivial task. The complex scenario of the dynamic extended enterprise triggers research toward the development of an innovative co-design platform to support multidisciplinary workgroups. Starting from the definition of a new design process model, the proposed approach is based on the formalization of the distributed knowledge in terms of interaction rules and representational models. © 2010 IFIP.

Keywords: agile organizations , collaborative design , virtual teamwork

Tissue engineering may be defined as the application of biological, chemical and engineering principles toward the repair, restoration or regeneration of living tissue using biomaterials, cells and biologically active molecules alone or in combinations. The rapid restoration of tissue biomechanical function represents a great challenge, highlighting the need to mimic tissue structure and mechanical behavior through scaffold designs. For this reason, several biodegradable and bioresorbable materials, as well as technologies and scaffold designs, have been widely investigated from an experimental and/or clinical point of view. Accordingly, this review aims at stressing the importance of polymer-based composite materials to make multifunctional scaffolds for tissue engineering, with a special focus on bone, ligaments, meniscus and cartilage. Moreover, polymer-based nanocomposites will also be briefly introduced as an interesting strategy to improve the biological and mechanical performances of polymer scaffolds, especially for bone tissue engineering. © 2010 Società Italiana Biomateriali.

Keywords: Bone , Cartilage , Composites , Ligaments , Meniscus , Polymers , Scaffolds

Since the assessment of the novelty, feasibility and value of new product ideas is highly subjective and uncertain, it is hard for companies to successfully apply their innovation strategies and coming up with a final product which is able to concurrently and successfully embody both customers' needs as well as company requirements. Without forcing the innovation process in a more rigid and constrained structure, the implementation of selected formal approaches in specific innovation process stages may reduce and guide this uncertainty especially in design, managerial and decision-making activities. In this paper both a design and managerial step-based framework is proposed to help firms achieve greater success in their efforts to develop new products. Already existing and well assessed methods and techniques, together with more recent and under development ones, are employed in authors' framework, which moves from idea generation until the early steps of concept implementation. The main paper aim is then to persuade companies avoiding the classical and wasteful trial-and-error approach and make them more predictable and responsive to continuous change and uncertainty. A case study is discussed in order to demonstrate the framework effectiveness, specifically focusing on its last step, when the technical implementation of the new concept has to be performed. © Organizing Committee of TMCE 2010 Symposium.

Keywords: Concept implementation , Decision-making , Engineering conflicts , New product development process , Project management

Reduction of energy consumption is important for reaching a sustainable future. This paper presents a novel method for optimizing the energy consumption of robotic manufacturing systems. The method embeds detailed evaluations of robots' energy consumptions into a scheduling model of the overall system. The energy consumption for each operation is modelled and parameterized as function of the operation execution time, and the energy-optimal schedule is derived by solving a mixed-integer nonlinear programming problem. The objective function for the optimization problem is then the total energy consumption for the overall system. A case study of a sample robotic manufacturing system is presented. It shows that there exists a possibility for a significant reduction of the energy consumption, in comparison to state-of-the-art scheduling approaches. © 2010 IEEE.

In recent years the importance of eco-design in the design process of a product has drastically increased. Eco-design is a design methodology aimed at reducing the environmental impact of a product throughout its complete life cycle. Within this context, life cycle assessment (LCA) is considered a powerful method of facilitating judgment on the environmental qualities of a design solution. However, before a complete LCA can be applied, the life cycle inventory (LCI) needs to be compiled. This is often a task too expensive and time consuming to complete in practice, since the data required is huge in amount and difficult to obtain. In this paper a novel approach is presented to supporting computer-aided compilation of life cycle inventories for simplified LCA. At the center of this approach is a software tool with an architecture that is capable of interfacing parameters of a LCA database with a PLM (Product Life cycle Management) database. © Organizing Committee of TMCE 2010 Symposium.

Keywords: Eco-design , Life cycle assessment , Life cycle inventory , Product life cycle management

The paper discusses a gearbox design method based on an optimization algorithm coupled to a full integrated tool to draw 3D virtual models, in order to verify both functionality and design. The aim of this activity is to explain how the state of the art of the gear design may be implemented through an optimization software for the geometrical parameters selection of helical gears of a manual transmission, starting from torque and speed time-histories, the required set of gear ratios and the material properties. This approach can be useful in order to use either the experimental acquisitions or the simulation results to verify or design all of the single gear pairs that compose a gearbox. Genetic algorithm methods are applied to solve the optimization problems of gears design, due to their capabilities of managing objective functions discontinuous, non-differentiable, stochastic, or highly non-linear. The final design tool, implemented in Matlab® environment, is based on the calculation of load capacity of helical gears, including the computation of tooth bending strength, of surface durability (pitting) and the estimation of service life under variable load, as suggested by International Standards. An automated macro procedure for Solidworks® interacts with the Matlab® environment to get the dimensional parameters of each gear and produces the models of each gear and their assembly. Copyright © 2010 SAE International.

In this paper, the authors discuss a methodology to enhance multibody systems simulations using Augmented Reality (AR) implementation. The AR deals with the use of live video imagery which is digitally processed and augmented by the addition of computer generated graphics. The purpose is to illustrate how recent developments in computer-aided design and augmented reality can improve the realism and interactivity when simulating the movement of digital mock-ups. The paper discusses hardware and software implementations and an overview of several illustrative examples. The basic idea is described starting from a simple simulation of a falling body subjected to gravity with the initial conditions set interactively by the user. Then, a more complex interactive simulation of the kinematics of a robot whose end-effector can be grabbed and moved by the user is presented. Finally, the real time dynamic simulation of a slider crank mechanism is discussed. The integration between AR and multibody simulation has revealed to be very useful for didactical purposes and collaborative design.

Keywords: Augmented Reality , Interactive simulation , Multibody

Part of manufacturers' responsibility when bringing out new products is to consider their environmental footprint. The legal supply chain combines hardware/software delivery, granting on-duty conformance to use preservation, and end-of-life take-back, with compulsory recovery targets. These entrepreneurial competencies appear externally, in respect to old manufacturing practices, which were internal. Networking options provide fundamental technological aids. This chapter analyses some technologically-driven solutions which stand out for the exploitation of net concerns at these three integration levels: business project co-operation, through spot-wise agreements; the factually united organisation or virtual corporation; joint and several liability, or extended corporation. The checks are centered on the bottom up series of appraisals, to evidence the return on investment from below so that the partnership permanently spurs motivation and fosters competition through properly established facilities/functions integration into unified competitive entrepreneurial organisations. © 2010, IGI Global.

In a recent project [8] the authors have developed an approach to assist the identification of the optimal topology of a technical system capable to overcome geometrical contradictions that arise from conflicting design requirements. The suggested method is based on the hybridization of partial solutions obtained from mono-objective topology optimization tasks. In order to investigate efficiency, robustness and potentialities of hybridization, a comparison among the proposed approach and the traditional Topology Optimization methods is here presented. The application of the proposed hybridization approach to several case studies of multi-objective optimization problems available in literature has been performed with the aim to evaluate the robustness of the method, through a direct benchmark between the hybridized topology and the traditional methods. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed method is computationally definitely less expensive than the conventional application of Genetic Algorithms to topological optimization, still keeping the same robustness in terms of searching the global optimum solution. Moreover, the comparison among the hybridized solutions and the solutions obtained through traditional topology optimization methods, shows that the proposed approach often leads to very different topologies having better performance. © Organizing Committee of TMCE 2010 Symposium.

Keywords: Computer-aided conceptual design , Computer-aided innovation , Embodiment design , Genetic algorithms , Topological optimization , TRIZ

In recent years the development of household appliances has increasingly focused on the reduction of noise. In this paper we report on attempts to reduce the sound-power level by a new systematical approach. A step by step method integrating different design models as Triz, Theory of inventive problem solving by Altshuller, FBS by John Gero, anticipatory failure analysis, and a specific noise knowledge database, is proposed in order to systematize the assessment phase and suggest improvements onto the system. Noise database, created by authors, collects an already known set of effective technical solutions on noise reduction, well organized to be offered to the user when needed. At the difference of other approaches, the method forces to reformulate the problem in terms of conflicting requirements and to work in managing an huge number of design parameters related to the whole set of potential noise physical effects. An exemplary application, in the field of vacuum cleaner, is here presented. Thanks to IMETEC (trademark of TENACTA Group S.p.a.), the Italian leading manufacturer of small household appliances, for allowing us to show some fragment and solution of the following application. © Organizing Committee of TMCE 2010 Symposium.

Keywords: Failure analysis , FBS , GTI , Noise reduction , Problem solving , TRIZ

Design processes are leading to the reduction of product development time and costs. This trend applies to the evaluation of function, architecture and high level information as far as possible at early stages of product design in order to allow the designer to compare radically different solutions rather than proceeding with fine tuning of a single option. Specifically, design of assembly processes requires information regarding neighborhood, interfaces and interactions between product components from product architecture definition stage, difficult to reach at early stages of design. Besides, assembly process concerns human interaction which is considered in a subjective way when it is analyzed as a design parameter, enterprise-specific conditions, and many suppositions derived from queries of skilled staff. So, an automated tool working with general abstract information available at early stages of design could be able to present more realistic behavior against methodologies with specific hypotheses and rules. In this work an automated method to find feasible assembly sequences without human intervention, in contrast with several solutions presented by different authors, is proposed. The developed method starts with the acquisition and evaluation of topological information of interaction between components of a discrete mechanical product at the early stages of concept and embodiment design [16], followed by the identification and hierarchical classification of independent minimum level subassemblies until the completion of the assembly procedure of the system obtaining at least one feasible assembly sequence. In this way an automated tool which yields a finite discrete number of feasible assembly sequences from all possible assembly solutions, is presented. © Organizing Committee of TMCE 2010 Symposium.

Keywords: Assembly sequence analysis , Automatic assembly sequence definition , Computer aided assembly planning , Design for assembly

The paper aims at providing a methodological contribution to the concept design of train interior in order to improve the quality perceived by users in compliance with railway standards. Indeed, the combined use of advanced CAD tools, experimental statistical methods and Virtual Reality tools allows developing, selecting and experimentally evaluating new concepts. The design cycle starts both from designers' proposal and the identification of user's needs; then, it makes use of datum-based CAD models in order to generate virtual concepts that satisfy railway standards; the cycle proceeds with the immersive evaluation of virtual prototypes, performed by potential and expert users in Virtual Reality. The identification of the optimal concept closes the design process. This procedure can be iterated in order to improve the quality of train interiors, evaluated thanks to the user's involvement in the design cycle. In this work a case study on seat design of a regional train is presented, developed at the Virtual Reality laboratory, named, of the Regional Centre for the qualification of transportation systems set up by Campania Regional Authority. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.

Keywords: CAD models , Concept design , Designfor quality , Kano methodology , Virtual reality

The paper presents a methodology aimed at the improvement of the product development cycle through the integration of Computer-Aided Innovation (CAI) with Optimization and PLM systems. The interoperability of these tools is obtained through the adoption of Optimization systems as a bridging element between CAI and PLM systems. This methodology was developed within the PROSIT project (http://www.kaemart.it/prosit). The paper describes the main issues related to the integration of these complementary instruments and the solutions proposed by the authors. More specifically, the main idea of the PROSIT project to link CAI and Optimization systems is the adoption of the latter tools not just to generate optimized solutions, but also as a design analysis tool, capable to outline critical aspects of a mechanical component in terms of conflicting design requirements or parameters. CAI systems are then applied to overcome the contradictory requirements. The second step, i.e. the integration between Optimization and PLM systems, has been obtained through the development of Knowledge-Based (KB) tools to support designer's activities. More in details, they provide means to analyze and extrapolate useful geometrical information from the results provided by the optimizer, as well as semi-automatic modelling features for some specific geometries. A detailed example related to the design of a plastic wheel for light moto-scooters clarifies the whole procedure. The paper integrates, extends and updates topics presented in Cugini et al., Barbieri et al. and Cascini et al. [U. Cugini, G. Cascini, M. Ugolotti, Enhancing interoperability in the design process-the PROSIT approach, in: Proceedings of the 2nd IFIP Working Conference on Computer-Aided Innovation, Brighton (MI), USA, October 8-9, 2007, published on Trends in Computer-Aided Innovation, Springer, ISBN 978-0-387-75455-0, pp. 189-200; L. Barbieri, F. Bruno, M. Muzzupappa, U. Cugini, Design automation tools as a support for knowledge management in topology optimization, in: Proceedings of the ASME 2008 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE 2008), Brooklyn, New York, USA, August 3-6, 2008; L. Barbieri, F. Bruno, M. Muzzupappa, U. Cugini, Guidelines for an efficient integration of topological optimization tools in the product development process, in: Third International Conference on Design Computing and Cognition, Atlanta, USA, June 23-25, 2008; G. Cascini, P. Rissone, F. Rotini, From design optimization systems to geometrical contradictions, in: Proceedings of the 7th ETRIA TRIZ Future Conference, Frankfurt, Germany, November 6-8, 2007]. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Computer-Aided Innovation , Knowledge-Based Engineering , Optimization systems , Product Lifecycle Management

This research work regards the development of a new roadmap for complex products design based on an improved modular approach. The goal is to refine an existing method affected by some drawbacks into a to new product development paradigm, with the aim of reducing design times, mistakes and subjectivity. The best results came from integrating a set of diverse methodologies for product design and systematic innovation. The proposed design paradigm is based on an improved Modular-TRIZ-DSM approach, and the results obtained, in terms of modules definition and interfaces, have been evaluated. The most important results concern a better repeatability of design results and the capability to forecast technical evolution of a specific product family. After a short description of the methodologies of interest, the roadmap is described focusing on the differences from the traditional method. Copyright © 2008 by ASME.

The design and implementation of a PLM solution in a cross-company environment is a complex and labour intensive operation, which is often coupled with a Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) project to better deploy technologies as well as methodologies and to target the system implementation on the real company needs. Enterprise Modelling (EM) languages are typically used to collect and share process knowledge among the BPR participants. Plenty of techniques are actually available at this scope and it is not always easy to understand how to select and use them in the different steps of re-engineering. The main purpose of this paper is to perform a qualitative analysis of three well known EM languages (IDEF, UML and ARIS) and to propose a new methodology, based on their integrated use, supporting BPR efforts in the Product Development domain. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: ARIS , Business Process Re-engineering , Enterprise Modelling , IDEF , UML

The paper represents the contribution to the PUODARSI (Product User-Oriented Development based on Augmented Reality and Interactive Simulation) research project in the development of a design environment which integrates modeling tools and CAE simulation capabilities. Typically, aerodynamic and mechanical performances of the object shape are in contrast with the stylistic requirements. Integrated tools and numerical simulations are then needed to support designers during the conceptualization of a new shape or when re-designing a product. This work combines Reverse Engineering methodologies and CAE tools to easily analyze the interaction between the aerodynamic behavior and the stress-strain state, due to viscous and pressure loads, of a physical object. A friendly interactive tool, based on MatLAB® and linked to Comsol Multiphysics®, was developed to drive user during the simulation and the visualization of results. © Springer-Verlag 2009.

Keywords: CAE , Design review , Meshing control , Reverse engineering