Rémy Houssin

Macro process of knowledge management for continuous innovation

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to explore the mechanisms of knowledge management (KM) for innovation and provide an approach for enterprises to leverage KM activities into continuous innovation.Design/methodology/approach – By reviewing the literature from multidisciplinary fields, the concepts of knowledge, KM and innovation are investigated. The physical, human and technological perspectives of KM are distinguished with the identification of two core activities for innovation: knowledge creation and knowledge usage. Then an essential requirement for continuous innovation – an internalization phase – is defined. The systems thinking and human‐centered perspectives are adopted for providing a comprehensive understanding about the mechanisms of KM for innovation.Findings – A networking process of continuous innovation based on KM is proposed by incorporating the phase of internalization. Three sources of organizational knowledge assets in innovation are identified. Then, based on the two core ac...

An approach to solve contradiction problems for the safety integration in innovative design process

Improving product behavioral performance in design process needs an innovative approach to integrate simultaneously most of the trades (safety, reliability, maintainability, etc.). Currently, safety integration is done in the latest phase of design process, to respect safety directives. This late integration causes some contradictions between productivity and safety. These contradictions could be related to technical and organizational problems. This paper proposes an innovative approach that aims to eliminate these contradictions in order to improve product performance in the use situations. This approach is based on 4 steps: systemic safety integration using Working situation model, taking into account the requirements of safety directives and standards; identifying the contradiction resulting from designers choices and finally resolving these contradictions using adapted methods like TRIZ. An application case is outlined in off-set industry, to show the applicability and usefulness of our approach.

Fostering continuous innovation in design with an integrated knowledge management approach

In the global competition, companies are propelled by an immense pressure to innovate. The trend to produce more new knowledge-intensive products or services and the rapid progress of information technologies arouse huge interest on knowledge management for innovation. However the strategy of knowledge management is not widely adopted for innovation in industries due to a lack of an effective approach of their integration. This study aims to help the designers to innovate more efficiently based on an integrated approach of knowledge management. Based on this integrated approach, a prototype of distributed knowledge management system for innovation is developed. An industrial application is presented and its initial results indicate the applicability of the approach and the prototype in practice.

Information system based on a working situation model for a new design approach in concurrent engineering

The research presented proposes an innovative approach for production systems design and modelling, which is based on a ‘Working Situation’ model (Hasan et al. 2003a). This approach aims to integrate all trades at the present time in the design process. The proposed model allows one to define the working situation and its characterizing elements. It also allows us to define the relative concepts to these elements. This model has been implanted in an ACCESS database. A demonstration information system, based on a product model named the Working Situation Model, has been developed in collaboration with a company that designs and produces printing lines. Our objective of this demonstration of the information system is to illustrate the utility of our model by presenting a using scenario of this model. The principle of this model is to describe exactly the conceived system by integrating the various points of view (functional, mechanical, geometrical, electric, etc.) by including references to the elements of working situation and risk (phenomena and dangerous zones (European Committee for Standardization 1993). In this scenario two essential points are highlighted. The first concerns the logical construction of this model. The second one concerns the communication improvement among the various actors of a concurrent engineering design process using the proposed methods in the model within the framework of a new design approach.

Safety-based availability assessment at design stage

The availability of a system or equipment is one of the crucial characteristics that measures the customer satisfaction and strongly influences his final choice decision between concurrent products. The aim of this work is to provide an approach to improve the products availability assessment by taking into account the safety criteria by considering the use situations at design stage. Our work focuses on the routine design of complex products. The availability is often simply estimated considering reliability and maintainability. Basically, the intrinsic availability is the probability that it is operating satisfactorily at any point in time when used under conditions stated by design specifications. The time considered includes operating time and active repair time. Thus, intrinsic availability excludes from consideration all other times in the product lifecycle such as: accident management time, storage time, administrative time or logistic time. But many studies show that the loss of availability performance is also due to accidents that occur in different unforeseeable utilization situations. This engenders stops of the system to ensure the users safety according to standards recommendations. In this purpose, we consider the structural product architecture and the different use cases that correspond to the operational states and downtimes due to stop events that may happen during the utilization like failures, maintenance tasks and accidents. Then, we propose a product behavioral analysis including the use cases to describe interactions between the product and users or maintenance operators. We use Markov chains to model the use cases corresponding to operating time (OT), maintenance time (MT) and preparing time after accidents (RT). Then these three parameters are considered to specify a generic approach to improve the availability assessment. Such an approach provides the traceability of the product behavior along its lifecycle. In this way, the main causes of stop can be identified and this may guide the designer for improving the availability of the product future versions. To validate our approach, an application is presented considering a printing line. The comparison of our simulation considering an industrial case study shows a good agreement about the influence of safety on the availability.

SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK FOR THE APPROACH: COMPUTER AIDED SAFETY INTEGRATION IN DESIGN PROCESS (CASID)

Nowadays, safety is often integrated at too late a stage in the design process of complex systems, such as machines or production lines. In most cases, this integration is made on an individual basis without any systematic method. Moreover, there are very few computer-aided software packages that allow the integration of safety aspects into the design process. In this paper, we present propositions of a model working situation using (UML).1 This model is implemented by prototype software called Computer Aided Safety Integration in Design process (CASID). The CASID approach is founded on a database in which all previous data generated by the designer using CASID is stored; furthermore, the software allows communication between designers in order to solve safety problems.

Proposal for a Design Approach for Mechatronic Systems Based on Optimization Design and Case-Based Reasoning

Multidisciplinary systems, such as mechatronic systems, are particularly complex to design because the designer needs knowledge in many fields. This paper is part of a routine process design to optimize the topology of a multidisciplinary system, which is difficult when dealing with more than one discipline or when solutions must be chosen within a set of components and combined. To solve this problem, an approach for the design and optimization of such systems is proposed. It is based on topology optimization, which combines the parametric optimization, using tools like genetic algorithms or particle swarm optimization, and the Case-Based Reasoning to find the best possible solutions by combining and adapting cases within a database or a set of components. This approach is then applied to the design of a gripping tool which will be mounted as a robot effector. This system belongs to the family of mechatronic systems which integrates mechanical, electrical, control and software engineering.Copyright

A Multiobjective Optimization Framework for the Embodiment Design of Mechatronic Products Based on Morphological and Design Structure Matrices

This paper deals with the embodiment design of mechatronic product and is intended for proposing a novel design support framework based on multiobjective optimization approaches. This framework builds design architectures by aggregating solution principles presented within a morphological matrix. Then, the solution principles are analyzed against compatibility. This compatibility analysis results in a design structure matrix. Once this compatibility analysis has been performed, the optimization framework developed in this paper is applied to find combination of solution principles. We showed the application of our framework for the embodiment design of a wind turbine.

A behavioural design approach to improving engineering design

The complexity of products is increasing as more and more functions and structures are included in them, leading to higher requirements on better understand of users’ behaviour in term of using the product during the early engineering design phase. Although, industry and academia agree that human aspects are important for the success of the product, there are few methods that support the designers concerning these factors in the synthesis part of the design works. This paper covers the multi-trade engineering design, and deals with the development of a behavioural design approach (BDA) to help designers to optimize the product performance in the early design phase through taking into account utilization conditions and requirements. Finally, a software application is in development to support and allow a systematic utilization of the “behavioural design approach” by integrating it into the daily work of the designer.

Multi-users of a Product: Emergence of Contradictions

The use of the product is randomly taken into account in the final phase of the design process, which leads to certain iterations and difficulty in use.