Jean-Pierre Micaëlli

Design Core Competence Diagnosis: A Case From the Automotive Industry

1990s have been marked by significant changes both in the strategic management field, with the development of competence-based management and the use of the concept of value-creating network, and in the design management field, with the diffusion of matrix-based tools that help to manage the interdependencies between three domains of design projects: product, process, and organization. Few researchers have helped to link these two fields. However, design managers need to use these fields closely together in order to enhance the firms sustainable competitiveness. Indeed specialists of engineering management have already underlined that design organizations are responsible for the development of lines of products that have to satisfy distinctive stakeholders requirements. Thus, design organizations strongly contribute to the firms core competence. In this paper, we outline a method for diagnosing design core competence. We intend to couple strategic management concepts and design management concepts to represent and evaluate design core competence in relation to the product, process, and organizational architectures. The proposed method aims to highlight crucial design organizations, which should require particular managerial attention. The method has been researched and constructed in collaboration with a car design office, and applied in the case of a new robotized gearbox design.

A method for jointly drawing up the functional and design architectures of complex systems during the preliminary system-definition phase

In systems engineering, determining a systems architecture is a crucial part of the preliminary system-definition phase because this architecture greatly impacts the quality of the system, the way the subsequent phases of the design process are organised and the overall performance of this process. Consequently, systems architects need methods for defining the couplings of modules (or sub-systems) and for estimating the impact of allocation decisions on candidate system architectures. This paper presents a method that helps simultaneously define the functional and design architectures of complex systems. Starting from an allocation matrix, or domain mapping matrix, which represents the couplings between the elements of two domains (functions vs. components), the method generates a sesign structure matrix (DSM) for each domain. A clustering algorithm is then applied to each DSM in order to generate a rearranged architecture. This method can be used in the synthesis process to provide architectural output that then forms the input data for the systems analysis process, where these data will help systems architects assess candidate architectures. We illustrate the method via an industrial case study focusing on a new automobile engine development project.

Preliminary Hazard Analysis Generation Integrated with Operational Architecture - Application to Automobile

We are witnessing evolution of standards (as the functional safety one) and increasing of complexity. This implies to perform safety studies efficiently and earlier in the context of Model-Based System Engineering. So, in this article, we will propose an evolution of the Preliminary Hazard Analysis (PHA) method in order to comply with the overall safety requirements in the automotive domain. To demonstrate its usefulness, we apply this method to an industrial case which concerns the hazard analysis of unintended acceleration of a vehicle.

A Framework for Building Behavioral Models of Technical and Economic Systems

This paper shows the possibility of modeling the physical and economic behavioral variables of a product by using Bond Graphs and the Dimensional Analysis Conceptual Modeling (DACM) framework. An example is taken. It concerns an innovative reverse vending machine, as well as economic variables related to its business models (price, turnover, life cycle, cost of ownership, etc.).