Marco Mandolini

CAD tools for designing shoe lasts for people with diabetes

In the context of a research program aiming at defining a framework to acquire patient data and support the whole shoe design and manufacturing process, this paper presents new CAD tools to design and validate lasts for shoes designed specifically for people with diabetes. Shoe last customising systems have already been proposed in the literature. However, tools for designing shoes for people with diabetes do not currently have the capacity to modify the last in order to reduce the risk of foot ulceration, whilst at the same time preserving the style of the shoe. The main contributions of the work are given by a method to identify the required design features to guarantee the footwear preventive function, the determination of a systematic protocol for orienting and measuring the virtual models of the feet and the lasts, and the definition of geometrical operators to modify the last shape according to its original aesthetic and the required footwear parameters. Such variables are computed by a knowledge based system on the basis of the patients pathology. The paper presents the implementation of two CAD tools and describes the procedures and the geometrical algorithms to handle the last geometry. Finally a case study is reported to show the advantages provided by the proposed approach in terms of achieved quality of the design process and expected footwear performance.

Promoting and Managing End-of-Life Closed-Loop Scenarios of Products Using a Design for Disassembly Evaluation Tool

In recent years, environmentally conscious design has become a fundamental approach for industries which have to consider the variable environment during the design process. Waste management is one of the most important aspects to be handled, to reduce the disposal in landfills and to encourage the sustainable 3R approach: Reuse, Recycling and Remanufacturing. Product disassembly is an essential phase of the product lifecycle, necessary to evaluate the End-of-Life (EoL) strategies and to reduce environmental impact. In order to minimize the impact on production and costs it is very important to consider EoL scenarios during the embodiment design phase, when designer’s decisions influence product structure. Design for Disassembly (DFD) is a powerful method to reduce disassembly time and costs. However, there are no useful tools which provide guidelines to improve the product disassemblability or promote specific EoL scenarios.For these reasons this paper describes an innovative Design for Disassembly approach and related tool to support designers in product disassemblability evaluation. The tool has the scope to manage EoL scenarios for industrial waste in the early design phases and to share metadata with the traditional design tools. Disassembly costs is one of the most important parameters during the evaluation of EoL scenarios. Six indices are presented to evaluate the economic and environmental feasibility of the EoL strategies. The calculation of the six indices permits alternative EoL scenarios to be compared and encourage the recyclability, reusability or re-manufacturability of a product. These evaluations can be used to foster a particular EoL scenario, as early on as in the design process. The preliminary analysis on mechatronic products underline the utility of the software tool and indices. Product re-design, realized using this approach, shows a relevant decrease in environmental impacts and disassembly costs. As a consequence, the new product has a relevant percentage of components with a closed-loop lifecycle.Copyright

Collaborative Design System for Supporting Dynamic Virtual Enterprises

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.

A design for EoL approach and metrics to favour closed-loop scenarios for products

Abstract Recently, environmentally conscious design and extended producer responsibility have become key aspects for companies that need to develop products that are sustainable along their whole life cycle. Design for End of Life (EoL) is a strategy that aims to reduce landfill waste through the implementation of closed-loop product life cycles. It is important to consider disassembly and EoL scenario management as early as the design phase. For these reasons, this paper presents an approach to help designers in the evaluation and subsequent improvement in product EoL performance. The method is based on four innovative EoL indices that compare different EoL scenarios for each product component. In this way, the designer can modify the product structure or the liaisons to maximise the reuse and remanufacture of components as well as material recycling. The presented case studies confirm the validity of the approach in helping designers during the redesign phase of goods and products to reduce the quantity of materials and industrial wastes sent to landfill.

Towards a design-to-sustainability platform based on functional representations and simplified geometric layouts

ABSTRACTSustainability is becoming one of the main drivers of the modern product and system design. However, sustainability assessments are usually carried out at the end of the design process to check the validity of the decisions already taken. As a consequence, when targets are not achieved, numerous time-consuming iteration loops are necessary to optimize the initial solution. The paper merges functional-based and design-to-cost approaches to propose a CAD-based platform able to assess product lifecycle costs and impacts from the earliest design stages by configuring and assessing feasible design solutions. It considers both economic expenses and environmental impacts during all phases of product lifecycle on the basis of the company knowledge.

How to Support Mechanical Product Cost Estimation in the Embodiment Design Phase

An efficient mechanical product design process implies the evaluation of many alternatives in a short time and rapid product changes on the basis of emerging needs. Product cost is one of the main factors in order to choose the most promising solution. Hence its accurate estimation in the design phases is fundamental. The main problem is the vast amount of knowledge that has to be managed in order to make robust evaluations. Features based 3D CAD models implicitly contain part of needed information. But such information has to be elaborated by adopting suitable rules based on manufacturing knowledge. In this context, the paper presents an approach and the related knowledge-based system able to automatically make reliable cost estimation starting from the 3D CAD model. The approach is based on the manufacturing knowledge formalization, on the geometrical and non-geometrical feature automatic recognition and, finally, on the mapping between manufacturing operations and modeling features. In order to validate the system performance case studies are reported.

Integrated Software Platform for Green Engineering Design and Product Sustainability

Nowadays, industrial products, particularly household appliances, are strongly related to environmental issues. Due to high levels of uncertainty regarding design embodiments at the early design phase, new methods and tools are essential to provide designers a basis to determine the degree of sustainability of a given product. The paper aims to integrate ecodesign activities within the traditional flow of the product design process through the development of an integrated software platform which supports the decision-making task for product sustainability in the early phase of product design.

Platform to support dynamic collaborative design processes in virtual enterprises

Collaborative product design favours the identification of innovative solutions as well as enriching the experience of those who participate. Nevertheless, the design and supply chain integration in product development processes is not a trivial task. The main difficulties are related to the different levels of individual expertise amongst team members and to the different organisation of the companies involved. The complex scenario of the extended enterprise triggers research toward the development of efficient methods and tools to support the design teamwork. The present article illustrates an innovative co-design platform which implements an approach to support dynamic collaborative design processes. Starting from the definition of a new design process model integrating different collaborative dimensions, the proposed approach is based on the formalisation of the distributed knowledge in terms of interaction rules and representational models. In particular, the process variability is managed through a new dynamic workflow system able to handle unpredictable events occurring when multiple partners collaborate. Case Based Reasoning algorithms (CBR) are used to manage unexpected events. They support the identification of existing rules in order to reconfigure the workflow. Experimentation is carried out in order to identify the main advantages of the system and also critical issues.

A Methodology and a Software Platform to Implement an Eco-Design Strategy in a Manufacturing Company

During past years several eco-design methodologies have been previously defined but none can be easily integrated in the traditional design process of manufacturing companies. This paper wants to overcome this lack and aims to define a methodology, called G.EN.ESI, to help also those designers without a specific know-how on eco-design, during the development of sustainable products. The methodology has been also contextualized in the traditional product design process, re-engineering this one with new input/output data, actors and specific tools, to demonstrate the applicability in real contexts.The re-engineered process is supported by a new set of integrated software tools, called G.EN.ESI platform. It is made of four tools for the definition of the product life cycle model, two tools for the evaluation of the environmental impact and Life Cycle Cost and a tool to guide the decision-making process during the re-design phase of a product. Furthermore, a web module to retrieve the necessary data from the supply chain subjects has been defined. Finally, the link with the CAD and PLM systems is proposed to increase the usability.© 2013 ASME

LeanDfd: A Design for Disassembly Approach to Evaluate the Feasibility of Different End-of-Life Scenarios for Industrial Products

Product disassembly is an important phase of the product lifecycle. It occurs to minimize the maintenance time and evaluate the End-of-Life (EoL) strategies, for example component reuse/recycling. These scenarios should be considered during the design process when decisions influence product architecture/structure. In this context, the present work describes an approach to support the designer’s evaluation of disassemblability by using the 3D CAD model structure and suitable key indices related to product features. A software system allows the product model to be analyzed and evaluates the disassemblability degree. An experimental case study facilitates the approach demonstration and highlights product performance.