Roland Stolt

Managing Fluctuating Requirements by Platforms Defined in the Interface Between Technology and Product Development

Product platforms play an important role for the efficient customisation and variant forming of products in many companies. In this paper four different companies ranging from OEM to B2B suppliers ...

The design platform – a coherent platform description of heterogeneous design assets for suppliers of highly customised systems

ABSTRACT Companies developing highly customised products are continuously faced with fluctuating requirements during the early and late stages of the product development (PD) process. This differs from companies that develop end-consumer products, which uses fixed specifications and where product platforms have been a successful enabler for efficient customisation. However, in the past, product platforms have not been able to fully support companies working in an engineer-to-order business environment. This article outlines the results from a three-year collaborative research project between academics within the area of engineering design and practitioners from the engineer-to-order industry. The research introduces a design platform (DP) that aims to support the development of customised products when traditional platform concepts do not suffice. The platform approach provides a coherent environment for heterogeneous design assets to be used in PD by supporting both the design activity and the finished solutions. The needs and abilities regarding such a platform were investigated through a series of interviews and workshops at four companies. Then, the DP was modelled and support tools were developed. Finally, company representatives evaluated the complete DP and its applications, reporting promising results.

Manufacturability Assessment in the Conceptual Design of Aircraft Engines – Building Knowledge and Balancing Trade-Offs

This paper addresses the automated assessment of manufacturability of air-craft engine components in the early stages of design, focused on the welding process. It is a novel part of a multi-objective decision support tool for design evaluation, currently running at a manufacturer of jet engine components. The paper briefly describes the tool and how it impacts the product development process. Further, the paper presents an integrated method for manufacturability assessment by finding welding processes that complies with all geometrical and other constraints found in the CAD-models of the conceptual engine. Here, preferences made by manufacturing engineers serves as a base for a manufacturability index so that different parameter settings in the CAD-models can be compared to find the best parameter settings, considering the trade-off with other performance criteria’s of the engine.

A CAD-integrated system for automated idealization of CAD-models for finite element analysis

Product development has both innovative and analytic sides. Starting from the requirements, a design suggestion is generated. In order to assess how well the envisioned design fulfils the requirements, it is sometimes necessary to build a computer model of it for the analysis. The overall motivation of the work presented is to reduce the time spent on creating the model by reusing knowledge gained from developing similar products by suggesting, building and evaluating IT-systems. To verify the systems real design examples, obtained from companies that have participated in the research projects have been used. The work is based on two major application examples. The first, involving the automated geometrical idealisation of die-cast parts (Paper I-III), and the second involving manufacturability of powder metallurgy pressed and sintered parts (Paper IV-VI). The work starts from the point in the product development process where it exists a design suggestion represented as an arbitrary format CAD-model. In the powder metallurgy case the object is to secure that the geometry is suitable for the production process. In the die-casting case the object is to automatically create an idealised version of the model for shell elements meshing. These two tasks have previously been treated as two separate cases, addressed by completely different software. This thesis suggests a common method for addressing the two cases. The method is based on converting the CAD-models, using the geometrical restrictions of the production processes, into a format with a specialised feature structure, parameterisation and construction history using a feature recognition approach. The features are then automatically reconstructed in a target CAD-system. The resulting, specialised CAD-model can be used for automated design and design evaluation purposes, demonstrated in the thesis. The models are therefore called DAR (Design Automation Ready)-models. The DAR-models are useful in that they separate the conversion from the subsequent treatment of the models providing modularisation, flexibility and user insight in the model structure. In that a construction history and parameterisation have be constructed in the target CAD-system, the advanced geometry manipulation and means for knowledge management often provided in modern CAD-systems can be accessed in a transparent and user manageable way. This extends the usefulness of the CAD-systems from involving only interactive work to managing all components sharing the same production process.

Manufacturability Analysis for Welding - A Case Study Using Howtomation © Suite.

This paper is a summary of master thesis written in the fall of 2015 in the department of Product Development in Jonkoping University in Sweden as a part of a research project with focus on the implementation and management of systems for design automation and design for manufacturing. It includes an implementation with the aim of enhancing a system currently in operation at an aerospace supplier. The system is used for multi-objective design analysis in the early phases of product development. The analysis involves both the performance of the jet engines components as well as their manufacturability. The work is focused on the weldability assessment, based on available weld methods and the weld capabilities of the company. A number of rules for analysing the weldability are proposed. To keep this knowledge transparent, traceable and updatable it is managed by a novel software called Howtomation© Suite which is a forward chaining inferencing engine. The proposed framework enables a weldability index and welding cost guide to be derived, helping the designers choose appropriate weld method in early design stages.

A platform model for suppliers of customized systems : Creating an ability to master fluctuating requirements

Manufacturing companies are continuously faced with requirements regarding technology novelty, shorter time to market, a higher level of functionality, and lower prices for their products. This is especially true of suppliers that develop and manufacture highly customized products within the automotive industry. It is not uncommon that a request for a new product or subsystem goes out to several suppliers and that the one that can deliver the product most quickly and at the lowest price receives the contract. It is therefore vital for any supplier to answer to quotation requests rapidly and with a high level of precision while also ensuring that company assets are used efficiently. Other issues that apply to suppliers in the automotive industry are heavily fluctuating requirements during development projects, each customer’s individual preferences, and the ever changing interfaces with the OEM product with which the supplier’s product is to be integrated. Platform strategies have been widely accepted in industry to serve a wide product variety while maintaining business efficiency. However, the challenge of applying a platform strategy at the supplier level in the face of the reality described above has not been fully investigated. Platform approaches tend to require a focused development of the platform, which in turn requires some knowledge about which future variants are to be derived from the platform. The research presented in this thesis investigates the state of practice in industry regarding the challenges, needs, and current use of platforms. To respond to the identified need, a platform approach is proposed that expands the scope of what a product platform has traditionally contained. This is undertaken to aid in the development of highly customized products when physical modules or component scalability does not suffice. The platform approach provides a coherent environment for heterogeneous design assets to be used in product development, supporting both the activity of designing and off-the-shelf solutions. The approach is based on identifying and modelling generic product items that are associated with descriptions governing their design. By describing the outcome of technology and product development like finished designs, design guidelines, constraints, etc., in a standardized format, the platform continues to evolve. To aid in using the platform approach, a support system called Design Platform Manager is introduced at a company active as a secondtier supplier in the automotive industry. The system enables the creation of generic product items that can be structured, instantiated, and associated with descriptions, which aids in realizing product variants. The aim of the platform approach and tool is to support the quotation and continued design processes by identifying valid knowledge to use as circumstances, such as requirement changes or new design iterations, warrant. The support tool and overarching model have been evaluated by company representatives, who reported good results.

Introducing Design Descriptions on Different Levels of Concretisation in a Platform Definition

Product platforms has been widely accepted in industry as a means to reach both high product variety while maintaining business efficiency. For suppliers of highly customised products, however, the development of a platform based upon pre-defined modules is a challenge. This is due to the large differences between the various systems their products are to be integrated into and the customer’s individual preferences. What is common for most platform descriptions is the high level of concretisation, such as predefined modules, they are built upon, but how can companies act when that is not possible? Are there other principles that can be used for the definition of a product platform? This paper presents a concept to incorporate other types of descriptions of different levels of concretisation into a product platform. Parts of the concept has been realised in a computer support tool and tested at a case company in order to improve their quotation process.

Implementation and Management of Design Systems for Highly Customized Products – State of Practice and Future Research

Individualized products, resource-smart design and production, and afocus on customer value have been pointed out as three opportunities for Swedishindustry to stay competitive on a globalized mark ...

TRACEABILITY OF DECISIONS IN PRODUCT REALIZATION PROCESSES OF CUSTOM ENGINEERED PRODUCTS

Custom engineered products require an engineer-to-order approach in development, quotation preparation and order processing. This work reports the result of a three-and-a-half-year project were the objective was to develop means for implementation and management of computer support for engineering design and production engineering of customized products. Efficient re-use is essential for success and decision is identified as the core concept to trace tasks executed, knowledge used, design rationale and artefacts developed throughout the product realization process.

A tool for obtaining transparency and traceability in heterogeneous design automation environments

ABSTRACTToday, CAD-system are used for much more than just geometric modeling. They are complemented by various software and information sources forming a complete environment for handling all life-cycle aspects of the product. In such systems, the CAD-system works as a central hub. The software and information sources may be of various types making the system highly heterogenous. This presents problems with transparency and traceability in the system making long term management difficult. In this paper, a novel tool is presented to keep track of the dependencies between the various parts of such systems providing an overview and making it possible to predict the effect of proposed changes and facilitating long term management. The tool is tested in a highly heterogeneous environment at a manufacturer of aerospace components, with the result that the traceability is expected to increase at the expense of that time must be spent on defining dependencies and meta-information as the system is evolving.