Sándor Vajna

The Autogenetic Design Theory: An evolutionary view of the design process

The design activity is the substantial activity within the product development process. The purpose of the Autogenetic Design Theory (ADT) is to view the genesis of a product during the design process as an analogy to the (technical) evolution of living creatures, to describe the design process as a continuous development process of technique and technology, and, by this, to provide a better understanding of the nature of the design process. Evolution means gradual development, permanent adaptation, and optimization towards an aim that may also change itself during the evolution. Both the development of a new product (new or original design) or the change of an existing product (adaptation design) can be described from the evolutionary view as a continuous optimization of a basic solution by observing starting conditions, boundary conditions, and constraints (which may evolve themselves, as well). The description and the modelling of all procedures within the design process are furthermore components of the ADT. A first implementation of the ADT deals with a support system for the multicriterial optimization of products. A broad range of industrial applications has been successfully accomplished.

Multidisciplinary design optimisation of a recurve bow based on applications of the autogenetic design theory and distributed computing

The focus of this paper is to present a method of multidisciplinary design optimisation based on the autogenetic design theory (ADT) that provides methods, which are partially implemented in the optimisation software described here. The main thesis of the ADT is that biological evolution and the process of developing products are mainly similar, i.e. procedures from biological evolution can be transferred into product development. In order to fulfil requirements and boundary conditions of any kind (that may change at any time), both biological evolution and product development look for appropriate solution possibilities in a certain area, and try to optimise those that are actually promising by varying parameters and combinations of these solutions. As the time necessary for multidisciplinary design optimisations is a critical aspect in product development, ways to distribute the optimisation process with the effective use of unused calculating capacity, can reduce the optimisation time drastically. Finally, a practical example shows how ADT methods and distributed optimising are applied to improve a product.

Integrated Product Development as a Design Philosophy in University Teaching

The main focus of this paper is to appraise Integrated Product Development (IPD) in industrial implementation and university teaching since the approach has been developed in the early 1980s by OLSSON and AN-DREASEN & HEEN. Integrated Product Development is still interpreted differently, in the range from development methodology to an idealised model of product development, as e.g. by ANDREASEN. But only the comprehensive description and understanding of the IPD approach as a development philosophy allows its application in all fields of product development. This philosophy contains four views: Planning and organisation, technology, methods & processes (especially with the inclusion of technical design), and human user (with the inclusion of ergonomics and working psychology). That is how it integrates all required factors for a successful product development, and, above all, fosters the finding of appropriate decisions with the right participants at the earliest possible time. This paper describes how the holistic product development philosophy of Integrated Product Development was implemented into the teaching at the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg (OvGU) and how this project oriented education is organized in integrative and interdisciplinary teams.Copyright

Optimize Engineering Processes With Simultaneous Engineering (SE) and Concurrent Engineering (CE)

The appropriate handling of time becomes one of the most important factors for industry to success because of globalization and market competition. Engineering processes should be optimized to achieve shorter “time to market”. This paper deals with Simultaneous Engineering (SE), which means parallelizing formerly serial executed product development processes, and Concurrent Engineering (CE), which means to cut processes into smaller sub processes or activities and parallelize them, both to achieve less product development time. The parallelization degree of processes depends on the dependencies between these processes. Therefore, the dependency between processes is defined and quantified. Processes are parallelized according to the result of the dependency calculation. Related concepts, methods and possible results are described in detail. An example is given about a home appliance product design processes to explain how the method works. The result shows that, with SE and CE, industry can reduce its product throughput time. The result depends also on how processes are modeled and how Concurrent Engineering is achieved.Copyright

Dynamic Project Navigation: Modelling, Improving, and Review of Engineering Processes

Engineering may be described as the main information and innovation source of a company. For an effective Engineering it is necessary to know well, to monitor, and to control all its processes and activities. Therefore a company needs a dynamic project and process navigation support for every user, which allows to model, to run, to react dynamically, and to evaluate activities in order to process these within given requirement, time, and cost frames. In this contribution, a system for dynamic project navigation in Engineering is presented with aspects of modelling, improvement and evaluation of processes.Copyright

Relationship Between Process and Product Structures: A New and Flexible Approach for an Integrated Dynamic Process Management

Today’s value chain products are an important drive of our society. Every product live cycle culminates in satisfaction of a customer need or as a part of other processes or services for the next customers needs.Copyright

Optimisation of a bow riser using the autogenetic design theory

The autogenetic design theory (ADT) is an approach aiming at modelling and supporting the design activity as the primary activity within the product development process. A new product development model must consider the mixed process of searching, adopting existing knowledge, learning, evaluating, selecting, and combining. Such methodologies are also found in biological evolution (the corresponding activities there are replication, evaluation, selection, recombination). The ADT is based on the idea that new solutions (individuals) can be developed by the use of evolutionary methodologies. Under the pressure of selection, good properties of the preceding solutions (parents) are passed on to the succeeding solutions (children). \noindent Typically, the riser of a recurve bow has to be of light weight and high stiffness. The challenge for the designer is to find the solution which best meets both demands. Due to the large number of technically possible designs, it is inefficient to model and evaluate more than a few designs manually. By applying the ADT, the designer has the ability to consider a large number of possible designs, which raises the probability of finding the best possible solution. In this case, the ADT allows us to reduce the mass by 22% while keeping the stiffness at the same level.

INSIDES: A New Design and Simulation Platform for Virtual Prototyping in Automotive and Aerospace Industry

Human Machine Interactions Systems (HMI) are decisive for acceptance and safety of new cockpits in the automotive as well as in the aerospace industries. A new design and simulation platform called INSIDES will be presented where virtual cockpit prototypes are being built based on 3D CAD geometry e.g. from CATIA and integrated with logical interaction data derived from UML specifications. This new development platform enables the continuous validation and check of new interaction concepts by involving usability engineers in the very early stage of the development cycle. Since the simulation work is being done in the context of the entire aircraft cockpit / car interior with all instruments, control commands as well as displays devices a better validation of HMI systems can be achieved.Copyright

Lightweight design optimization of a Bow Riser in Olympic Archery applying evolutionary computing

Recurve bows that are used in competitions like the Olympic Games are high-technology products. Good risers are lightweight but retain a high stiffness. The aim of this study was to design a riser with a stiffness comparable to that of the lightest riser currently used by the archers of the German National Archery Team, but with a considerably reduced weight. We computed the loads that are applied to a riser of a drawn recurve bow (the RADIAN model used by the German team) and created a 3-D solid CAD model of a riser with 24 variable parameters. We used evolutionary computing to optimize the 24 parameters of the model according to these criteria. We selected the most optimal riser out of the 1650 CAD models generated, manufactured it, and had it tested by three archers of the German National Archery Team. The mass of our manufactured riser is 871g, which is 243g or 22% less mass than the RADIAN riser.

Autogenetic Design Theory: An Approach to Optimise Both the Design Process and the Product

The paper presents a new approach aiming at modeling and supporting the design activity as the substantial activity within the product development process. The Autogenetic Design Theory facilitates the integration of intuition, creativity and artificial intelligence into the conventional design process. To this end, a phase-like allocation of the design process is assumed as the essential structure and an evolutionary algorithm is integrated as the core facilitating purposeful searching and combining. Hence, the flow of the design process can be influenced as all requirements can be included and, on the other hand, intuition and creativity are ensured through the evolutionary algorithm. The example of the shift fork, which was described in the paper, shows how ADT can support variant design. Next steps will include the application of the ADT to the other types of design. The optimisation of the shift fork was the first step towards a computer-based implementation of the ADT.Copyright