Christian Johansson

Demand side management in district heating systems

This paper describes a multiagent system that has made the voyage from research project to commercialised product. The purpose for the multiagent system is to dynamically control a system so that the load of the system is below certain threshold values without reduction of quality of service and by that, to avoid the usage of top load production sources and to reduce energy consumption. The fundamental idea behind the system is that a large number of small local decisions taken all in all have great impact on the overall system performance. A field-test as well as a return of investment analysis are presented.

Knowledge Maturity as a Means to Support Decision Making During Product-Service Systems Development Projects in the Aerospace Sector

Streamlining new product development forces companies to make decisions on preliminary information. This article considers this challenge within the context of project management in the aerospace sector and, in particular, for the development of product-service systems. The concept of knowledge maturity is explored as a means to provide practical decision support, which increases decision makers’ awareness of the knowledge base and supports cross-boundary discussions on the perceived maturity of available knowledge, thereby identifying and mitigating limitations. Requirements are elicited from previous research on knowledge maturity in the aerospace industry, and a knowledge maturity model is developed through five industry-based workshops.

On the way to knowledge awareness in early design

This paper discusses views on decision support in product development to identify factors of relevance when designing computer-based decision support for total offers. Providing services in form of physical artefacts offered as ‘functions per unit’ is at the heart of total offers. Total offers gain access to possibilities to ‘design in’ value added characteristics into the physical artefact, e.g., maintenance, monitoring, training, remanufacture. Contemporary computer tools seem to be insufficient to support a GO/NO GO decision for total offers. Relevant factors to take into consideration are to support learning and provide the decision makers with insights in a number of plausible ‘what-if’ scenarios to improve the solution space.

Social Technologies for Cross-Functional Product Development: SWOT Analysis and Implications

In product development, innovation means bringing together people with different expertise to develop breakthrough product and service offers. In spite of their potential, cross-functional efforts are not yet adequately supported from a knowledge perspective, asking for a more open and bottom-up approach for knowledge management. The paper aims to investigate how social technologies can enhance collaboration and knowledge sharing in complex, cross-functional and cross-organizational product development projects, highlighting the role of weak ties as enablers for more innovative design processes. Emerging from data collected in two case studies within the European aeronautical industry, it applies the Strengths-Weaknesses-Opportunities-Threats (SWOT) framework to highlight how wikis, blogs, forum or microblogs can shorten lead-time and increase the quality of early design decisions. Furthermore, it elaborates on how the design team can enhance its perception of the needs to be addressed and leverage its capability to develop solutions for the task at hand.

Performance measurement framework for product-service systems development: a balanced scorecard approach

The paper proposes a framework for analysing the performances of product-service systems (PSSs) development processes using a balanced scorecard (BSC) as an instrument to guide the implementation and the evaluation of new methods and tools. Emerging from a case study in the aerospace industry, the paper discusses the main challenges in PSS development and proposes a performance measurement framework for PSS development based on multi-criteria indicators. Finally, the benefits of a framework for PSS development performance measurement are discussed.

A Case Study on Availability of Sensor Data in Agent Cooperation

Multi-agent cooperation can in several cases be used in order to mitigate problems relating to task sharing within physical processes. In this paper we apply agent based solutions to a class of problems defined by their property of being predictable from a macroscopic perspective while being highly stochastic when viewed at a microscopic level. These characteristic properties can be found in several industrial processes and applications, e.g. within the energy market where the production and distribution of electricity follow this pattern. We evaluate and compare the performance of the agent system in three different scenarios, and for each such scenario it is shown to what degree the optimization system is dependent on the level of availability of sensor data.

Decision-making in gates : based on formal basis or gut feeling?

Manufacturing companies continuously deal with development of innovations. Many of these are cancelled on the way, in gate meetings. This paper investigates why technologies are cancelled, and on which basis managers make decisions. The paper is based on a study from the automotive industry with interviews with different stakeholders in the gates. The most common reasons for stopping projects were time, cost and technology readiness. Gut feeling is found to be an important factor when evaluating projects. This paper concludes that managers need to understand the role of intuition and query for this subjective information in addition to objective measures.

Managing Uncertainty and Ambiguity in Gates : Decision Making in Aerospace Product Development

This paper investigates decision making in the stage-gate process used by an aerospace manufacturer. More specifically, it focuses on the way decision makers deal with uncertainties and ambiguities when making decisions. The stage-gate model was found to be a discussion trigger — a boundary negotiating artefact — through which stakeholders bring issues to the table, reflect on uncertainties, and decide in what areas more knowledge is needed. Managers should be aware that the knowledge base might not always be perfect and should make use of the sensemaking capabilities of the stage-gate model and the gate meeting to mitigate and improve the knowledge base. This paper elaborates on formalized knowledge-based criteria so as to support this evaluation of the knowledge base.

Experience Feedback Using Social Media: From the Product Lifecycle Phases to the Design Practices

Many companies have been using lessons learned practices as one of their key knowledge management initiatives to capitalize on past experiences. For product development companies, learning from product lifecycle phases gives a true competitive advantage to improve the next generation of products. However, companies are still struggling in capturing and sharing lessons learned and applying them in new situations. Based on this consideration, the paper proposes a video-based approach-using social media technologies-as a way to leverage continuous capturing and sharing lessons learned from product lifecycle phases to design practices. The paper presents the findings of a case study within the aerospace industry, which investigates the current industrial practices with regard to experience feedback, and illustrates the implementation of a video-based approach. Further, the conceptual mock-up of video-based les- sons learned sharing portal and its social platform that are aimed to support the design practices are illustrated.

Methods and Tools for Knowledge Sharing in Product Development

The emerging industrial business partnerships, which feature cross-functional and cross-company development efforts, raise the barrier for the establishment of effective knowledge sharing practises in the larger organization. This chapter aims to highlight the role of knowledge as a key enabler for effective engineering activities in the light of such emerging enterprise collaboration models. Knowledge enabled engineering (KEE) is presented as an approach to enhance the extended organization’s capability to establish effective collaboration among its parts, in spite of different organizational structures, technologies or processes. KEE is analyzed in its constituent parts, highlighting areas, methods and tools that are particularly interesting for leveraging companies’ knowledge sharing capabilities.