Lightweight potential is a powerful indicator – but not as powerful as it could be. Current methods for analyzing a product's potential to be reduced in mass only deal with a few of the most important criteria for lightweight design. This paper presents an approach transferring cost-benefit analysis to the holistic derivation of lightweight potential. The approach is able to deal with different types of criteria supporting the designer in indentifying the most promising components for mass reduction. An evaluation example is given showcasing a tooling machine.

Analytical cost estimation of investment casted products during design phase is a complex task since the quantity of parameters to be evaluated. So far, there is a short literature on such cost estimation models. This paper attempts to improve the cost model presented by Boothroyd and Dewhurst. Improvements (mainly focused on cluster assembly and investment, sintering and melting phases) were defined and verified in cooperation with two foundries. Tested on eight components, deviation between estimated and actual costs is around 14% for manual production lines and 6% for automatic ones.

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is shared online so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell it. In spite of the increasing popularity of this alternative IP management approach, the field of OSH remains fragmented of diverse practices seeking for settlement. This challenges providers of groupware solutions to capture the specific needs of open source product development practitioners. This contribution therefore delivers a list of basic requirements and verifies them by comparing offered functions of existing groupware solutions.

Additive Manufacturing is doing its first steps in the production of spare parts. Usually the spares belong to legacy systems, and the tooling to produce them is no longer available. Re-designing spares that are designed for a previous industry mindset can be sometimes challenging. In this study a rather classic design approach is compared to a functional driven approach. Four case studies from different clients are reported, remarking the benefits and drawbacks of using design for additive manufacturing practices in Laser Powder Bed Fusion.

Engineer-To-Order (ETO) companies develop complex one-of-a-kind products based on specific customer demands. Given the product uniqueness, the commissioning plays an important role in the product development process. However, the project variety and low data availability hinder the analysis of the commissioning processes. This paper proposes a framework for the structured analysis of commissioning processes in ETO companies by analysing the impacts from product requirements and design on the commissioning performance. A case study presents the practical application of the developed framework.

The recent interest in human-robot interaction requires the development of new gripping solutions, compared to those already available and widely used. One of the most advanced solutions in nature is that of the human hand, and several research contributions try to replicate its functionality. Technological advances in manufacturing technologies and design tools are opening possibilities in the design of new solutions. The paper reports the results of the design of an underactuated artificial robotic hand, designed by exploiting the benefits offered by additive manufacturing technologies.

Mass-personalization (MP) presents an opportunity to meet diversifying customer needs in consumer products market with a near mass-production efficiency. Traditional product development methodologies fall short to guide design for MP and a dedicated systematic methodology is essential. The proposed approach bases on a dynamic product template that automatically adapts with user input and produces a reliable output. This paper presents the workflow towards mass-personalization of saxophone mouthpieces with focus on design automation.

The study of design cognitive activity began in the 70s under the influence of psychology and ergonomics. Since then, the design process has undergone many changes with the advent of technology. This paper will notably present you to one of them: the Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR). The study conducted with this technology will focus on multimodal analysis in co-design meetings were we have compared two co-design sessions. We notice that the design activity is unchanged by the introduction of such a technology but could encourage interactions from clients who are usually less invested.

This paper presents a novel approach to include a holistic description of abstract physics in a digital engineering framework. Physical phenomena realize the numerous functions of technical systems and are an important link between rather abstract product functions and the concrete product geometry and material. Until now, a possibility to integrate the analysis and synthesis on this level of abstraction into a holistic engineering frameworks is not existing. The novel approach employs graph-based design languages using UML for this endeavour; the product example is a two-wheel scooter.

Maturity levels of components in early phases of product development are often assessed with Technology Readiness Levels. However, developing Multi-Material-Design (MMD) concepts for lightweight design, not only the manufacturability of the individual components is decisive, but also their joinability with each other and their integration into the rest system. This paper presents an approach for the evaluation of maturity levels of MMD concepts on the basis of cardinal coefficients considering a time forecast of the manufacturing and joining technologies required in the concept.

Manufacturing companies nowadays face growing numbers of heterogeneous customer requirements. Due to that, internal and external complexity lead to an increase in the associated costs. Especially companies with a high Engineer-to-Order business are strongly affected. To reduce external and internal complexity, Starting Solutions are a suitable way to do that. Starting Solutions require on the one hand the evaluation of product flexibility, on the other hand the evaluation of customer requirements. These two requirements are compared to each other and Starting Solutions are thereby derived.

Maximizing the number of shared components does not always produce cost-optimal product families. Shared components can yield economies of scale due to reuse of components, but also increases material cost due to over dimensioning. In this paper, we present an approach to identify a cost-optimal design for product families. It consists of two steps: (1) identifying a scheme to share components in the product family and (2) finding the cost optimal design for the product family.

Lightweight design (LWD) is partly reaching its limits. New technologies must not only be used to make products more functional, but also to make LWD more efficient. Here additive manufacturing (AM) should be named. Potentials of the use in LWD are not yet clear. In this work, existing LWD strategies and their location in the design process are presented. Criteria are worked out which influence the design process and the use of LWD strategies. The use of AM in (hybrid) LWD will be investigated in order to overcome design trade-offs and what influence its use could have on the design process.

Supplier of system components face the challenge of customer requirements influencing the property level functional integral product architectures. For this, solution approaches focusing on the re-use of pre-engineered part variants are not applicable. However, to generate a valid product structure, customer-specific properties have to fit modelled product knowledge. Therefore, the approach models a reference class structure and analysis compatibilities on the property level for customer specific inputs concerning explicit product knowledge and constraints.

In modular products conflicting objectives may occur. This leads to characteristics as component-dependent oversizing and undersizing as well as increased complexity of the interfaces. These conflicts can be resolved using the potentials of AM processes. For the best use possible, the potentials are systematically considered in the early design phases as part of an extended procedure. The extended procedure improves the benefit-effort ratio of modular respectively individual products and a further optimization of the product architecture and consideration of synergy effects is achieved.

This paper reports the application of the methods and tools of fault-tolerant design to an automated shifting system and their reflection and extension. Fault-tolerant design has emerged in the last years and is generally understood as a collection of strategies, methods, algorithms, tools and insights which are intended to support the development of technical systems which are fault-tolerant because of their controllability but also their inherent fault-tolerant design qualities. The field of application is a shifting system for the gear system of a formula student driverless race car.

Collaborations between design engineers and bioscientists offer novel opportunities that could help solving some of the biggest challenges organisations and societies are facing. Combining design and bioscience has the potential to create responsible and desirable products/services, however such ventures come with challenges rising from boundaries between practices. This research explores boundary objects as sources of framing in multidisciplinary collaborations. The results are based on a descriptive study with synthetic biologists and design engineers working on an innovation-driven task.

The topic of support structure design in the Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) field is not addressed with the same relevance as the topic of part design. Therefore, this contribution investigates parameters for both the manufacturing and support structure design for the Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF) process. Matrices for cause-effect-relations of manufacturing and design parameters on build properties as well as correlations of them are presented. Based on these, recommendations for actions for experimental procedures are derived following the Design of Experiments method.

Comparing the propensity for risk in concepts with little commonality, such as different working principles, different number of functions and components, is challenging to achieve in a systematic and traceable manner. This paper builds on the Function Integrity Diagnosis and Documentation method to introduce a Function Integrity indicator as a means to quantitatively compare dissimilar design concepts based on risk assessment. The proposed indicator is intended to support designers converge on a suitable design concept based on considerations of risk to concept functions.

Engineering changes (ECs) and engineering change management (ECM) are crucial for successful product design processes (PDP). Due to the increasing complexity of today's products (like vehicles) and the interaction of different engineering domains (mechanics, electric/electronics, software) involved in the PDP, cross-domain EC impact assessments as well as processes are required. To better support engineers in assessing change propagation across domains and products, existing approaches for ECM product models are analyzed in this paper and an enhanced product model is derived using MBSE.