For the economic use of repair in the spare parts business, additive repair by Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF) is a promising technology. As material can only be applied to a flat surface in LPBF, prior machining is required. The selection of the section plane requires expert knowledge, though. To provide that knowledge and recommend a suitable section plane, an expert system can be used. In this paper, a concept for such an expert system is presented and its functionality is evaluated by an example.

Modern products are often developed in local distributed teams involving various engineering domains. As a result, product development processes are characterized by a high degree of complexity and individuality. However, the project context is often not integrated into the project planning, which can lead to uncertainties in the processes. In addition, reflection does not take place adequately in process execution. Therefore, this paper presents a concept for agile process design that enables reducing uncertainties based on context-specific reflections and adapting the processes.

An efficient general arrangement is a cornerstone of a good ship design. A big part of the whole general arrangement process is finding an optimized compartment layout. This task is especially tricky since the multiple needs are often conflicting, and it becomes a serious challenge for the ship designers. To aid the ship designers, improved and reliable statistical and computation methods have come to the fore. Genetic algorithms are one of the most widely used methods. Islier's algorithm for the multi-facility layout problem and an improved genetic algorithm for the ship layout design problem are discussed. A new, hybrid genetic algorithm incorporating local search technique to further the improved genetic algorithm's practicality is proposed. Further comparisons are drawn between these algorithms based on a test case layout. Finally, the developed hybrid algorithm is implemented on a section of an actual ship, and the findings are presented.

The ongoing digitization of engineering processes and the increasing prevalence of smart products create possibilities for new business models and services. Digital twins enable the collection of all required data about a smart product in order to make these possibilities a reality. This paper describes a flexible approach towards a digital product twin that is tightly integrated with existing product models while being lightweight and easy to integrate with existing IT solutions.

Agile has its roots in software, improving the pace and quality of development projects. The application of Agile to hardware is less mature, and anecdotal evidence suggests there are specific challenges in this space. Based upon qualitative interviews with organizations working simultaneously across hardware and software applications, this paper presents three key challenges we identified. We also document several useful adjustments to Agile practice which provide a toolset that teams can use to more successfully apply Agile to hardware projects.

The advantages of distributed development teams help companies to address megatrends like globalization and individualization. However, development teams are facing challenges according to increasing requirements on communication processes. This approach provides a methodology to identify and address improvement potentials in communication processes of distributed product development by including the dimensions technology, organization and human involved in the development process. The validation of the methodology's process steps was carried out together with a machine tool manufacturer.

Product Service Systems (PSS) are increasingly important for companies. They enable a multitude of advantages, including the ability to offer customers even more individual customised solutions. However, PSS can also cause negative effects for companies. For example, PSS increase the complexity within companies. In order to cope with this complexity, the modularisation of PSS is frequently suggested in literature. However, existing approaches for modularisation only consider functional reasons for module composition and neglect the product-strategic aspects. This paper introduces a new approach for the modularisation of PSS, which combines functional and product-strategic aspects into one approach. To achieve this, a separate modular structure is developed for each life phase. Following this, these are harmonised across all life phases. This enables the advantages of the modular PSS structure to be used in all life phases. A PSS family of laser processing machines is used to illustrate the new developed approach.

Recent advances in sensing and networking technologies, namely the Internet of Things (IoT), have become key enablers of data-intensive design processes. However, the recent introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe has raised concerns that the GDPR might hamper data- intensive design processes. In this paper, we map the challenges of enabling ethical and compliant design of product-service systems with personal IoT data. Specifically, we present a 4-year project led by EON, an international energy provider, to design innovative home energy systems that leverage emerging technologies such as solar panels, electric vehicles and home batteries. We present our 6-stage approach to design, centred on IoT data. We highlight the barriers of responsible design with data and identify three novel trust principles for compliant use of personal IoT data in design (private-by-default, analytics transparency and Accountable analytics).

Customer centricity is described as placing value creation for customers at the core of business decisions and organizational practices and is progressively regarded as a foundation of sustainable competitive advantage by companies. Hence in recent years, there is a shift from companies being product-centric to them adapting customer-centric practices as a practice to create balanced and sustainable businesses. Although there are several methods and processes that can help companies become customer-centric; Design Thinking (DT) is championed by many practitioners and academics alike as being effective in introducing customer-centricity in organizations. Despite being a highly researched topic in the last decade, the bulk of the research is focused on success stories or one-off cases of using design thinking in Business to Customer (B2C) environments. This paper is based on a qualitative study performed at a high-tech Swedish electronics company and focuses on highlighting the barriers and opportunities of adapting DT in Business to Business (B2B) companies with established product development processes. The barriers we identified can help companies to address the impediments and will make the DT implementation easier for companies

Endoprosthesis are exposed to the risk of aseptic loosening. The design of the prosthesis shaft to achieve physiological force application is therefore of great importance. Additive manufacturing offers the potential to fabricate highly variable topologies, but challenges the designer with a large number of design variables. In this work, a method is developed to determine an optimized density topology that approximates a given mechanical stress state in the bone after implantation. For this purpose, a topology optimization of the density distribution of the implant is performed.

Various factors influence mental well-being, and span individual, social and familial levels. These factors are connected in many ways, forming a complex web of factors and providing pathways for developing programs to improve well-being and for further research. These factors can be studied individually using traditional methods and mapped together to be analyzed holistically from a complex system perspective. This study provides a novel approach using PageRank and social network analysis to understand such maps. The motives are: (1) to realize the most influential factors in such complex networks, (2) to understand factors that influence variations from different network aspects. A previously developed map for children's mental well-being was adopted to evaluate the approach. To achieve our motives, we have developed an approach using PageRank and Social Network Analysis. The results indicate that regardless of the network scale, two key factors called "Quantity and Quality of Relationships" and "Advocacy" can influence children's mental well-being significantly. Moreover, the divergence analysis reveals that one factor, "Recognition/Value Placed on well-being at School" causes a wide range of diffusion throughout the system.

The need to understand users and products is one of the cores for product success. There are many ways to reach this understanding,such as,interviews and consumer cocreation. This study put a focus on the application of product usage information (PUI). Although amount of product-related information is available in the middle of a product's life, producers have not realized the full potential of these data in product development. The academic literature describes various use cases that outline how PUI supports this kind of understanding, and eventually benefits product development. Each of them provides fragmented information from certain perspectives. This diversity and the lack of systematic overview facilitates a fragmentation in the research of PUI usage in product development. To have an initial and unified overview of PUI's value on the understanding of users and products, this paper conducted a combination of systematic and descriptive review to form a sample with 12 papers. The result indicates that PUI increases producer's understanding about the product, its users and the context of usage. However, producers need to address several challenges if they want to apply PUI in product development successfully.

The current engineering environment demands for an increasing level of interdisciplinarity, innovation, creativity and cross-domain thinking as well as the consideration of sustainability aspects. New concepts, such as Digital Twins and complex product systems lead to the need for integrated product development approaches and new methods that put the user perspective in focus. This also needs to be an integral part in today's teaching concepts of the next generation of engineers.

At the Department of Industrial Information Technology of the Technical University of Berlin, a case study was conducted by applying a concept of project-based learning in the engineering domain to address these challenges. In this paper, the case study as well as the method and its validation are presented. Students from different engineering disciplines had the task of developing virtual and physical prototypes for a sustainable, complex product system with a digital twin and respective sustainable business models. Within a structured survey, the teaching concept and the applied method were validated and lessons learned as well as further improvement measures are derived.

Little study has been done on the adoption of End-of-Life (EoL) strategies on the medical devices industry, despite the reasons why it is an important area of study for the implementation of circularity. The rates of waste in the medical field are alarming and tend to grow. Though presenting a wide potential for EoL strategies implementation, the medical field is also inherently challenging, considering the rigid regulations and product's risk to patients life. This paper analyses 17 Product-Service System case studies identified in the literature. Eleven of them are from various fields of industry, whereas the other six are applied to the medical devices industry. The adoption of EoL strategies - namely repair, reconditioning, remanufacture and recycling - is analysed in each case and compared for the two categories of cases. This adoption is related to the sources of value creation in Circular Economy, to the PSS typology and, at last, special EoL treatment for medical devices is discussed.

The use of flexible and autonomous robotics systems is the solution for the automation task of the production and intra-logistics environments. This dynamic context requires the robot to be aware of its surroundings through the whole task, also after accomplishing the gripping action. We present an anomaly detection approach based on unsupervised learning and reconstruction fidelity of image data. We design our method to enhance the dynamic environment perception of robotics systems and apply it in a palletizing robot, in order to perceive and detect changes to its surrounding and process after the gripping step. Our proposed approach achieves the performance targeted by the considered industrial requirements.

Different variants of a-posteriori novelty metrics can be found in the literature. Indeed, such a kind of assessment procedures is often used to extract useful information about creativity and/or idea generation effectiveness. In particular, the metric proposed by Shah et al. in 2003, is one of the most used and discussed in the literature. However, scholars highlighted some flaws for this metric, and some variants have been proposed to overcome them. This paper argues about the variants proposed for the a-posteriori metric of Shah et al., and proposes a selection framework to support researchers in selecting the most suited for their experimental needs. The proposed selection framework also highlights important research hints, which could pave the way for future activities. More specifically, it is still necessary to support the identification of the best-suited abstraction framework to assign weights to attributes, and the assignment of weights should be better supported as well. Moreover, this paper highlights the presence of “uncommonness of key attributes”, which needs to be investigated for experimental cases where ideas missing some key attributes are present.

Product customization aims to consider individual customers preferences in the design of new products, in order to directly involve them in the product development process and to maximize their satisfaction. It can be considered a key competitive factor and a “hot topic” in several industrial sectors, including luxury apparel goods and high-end footwear products. However, currently the design and manufacturing of customized shoes are carried out through artisanal and non-standardized processes, based on the individual expertise of operators.

The objective of this study is to define an innovative framework to support the different processes affected by customization. This framework is enabled by different digital technologies, as CAD-based tools, virtual/augmented reality systems, etc., opportunely integrated in the product development process. The main benefits related to the framework implementation in real industrial contexts are an increase of flexibility, the repeatability of processes, a higher efficiency in information exchange, a more effective involvement of final customers, and, as a consequence, the reduction of time to market and production costs for tailor-made shoes.

The paper explores the differences between immersive and non-immersive collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) during design reviews. Based on ten reviews with one designer and two reviewers, the study shows that CVEs affect verbal communication structure. More specifically, teams usually talked less, and reviewers exchanged significantly more turn sequences in immersive than in non-immersive CVEs. Regardless of the environment, most turn sequences were related to the designer, who usually talked the most. These findings contribute to the understanding of CVEs in virtual teams.

Science and technology generated by Universities has many challenges in reaching commercial product applications, as has been explored in a range of literature. Product design has been identified to add value through various types of contributions in addressing these challenges; however, there remains a gap in literature to explore how and when product development activities can practically be applied to technology development.

This paper furthers the idea that the product development process can help bridge the gap between the laboratory and commercial applications by proposing a framework for how Ulrich and Eppinger's product development process can integrate with the STAM technology development model. This is a significant step towards understanding how in practice these disciplines can work together to bring science and technology from the laboratory to products in the marketplace.

Engineering change management is a central part of the product development process. This paper investigates how variations from the PGE - Product Generation Engineering can improve the evaluation of engineering changes from the wiring harness. Engineering changes that occur in an automotive wiring harness development process are analysed in a case study, evaluated in expert interviews with regard to the risk and effort connected to the implementation and compared to the types of variations. Additional influencing factors are discussed. The variations provide an indication on risk and effort.