In the last few years, the growing need of highly reliable and time-effective strategies to perform preliminary design of complex systems has led industries to adopt the Model Based System Engineering (MBSE) approach. In MBSE, systems are split into multiple sub-systems and the relevant physical phenomena are described via analytical or numerical models. When a significant number of design variables are to be considered, a smart approach to reduce the number of analyses to perform would be to make use of the Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA) to higlight those variables that have a more significant influence on the system output. Moreover, an even more significant reduction of computational cost to perform the GSA can be achieved if the complex system modelled via the MBSE approach is exported under the Functional Mock-Up Interface (FMI) norm. In this context, this paper proposes an original approach to address the study of two constructive solutions of an acceleration measuring device typically used on airbags for which the use of a new solution characterized by a porous material is compared with a classical one.

Geographic distance between supply and demand reduces spatial accessibility. Vehicles have been contributing to improved spatial accessibility by offering transport services for people and goods. From traditional trucks to mobile health clinics, vehicles can offer a wide range of functionalities on wheels. To develop context-specific vehicles-based services, we propose a novel engineering framework based on a supply chain perspective. Requirements are derived from supply chain stakeholders and translated into vehicle-based services and vehicle components.

Everyday Designing (ED) involves the re-use of existing products for new purposes. In order to gain an understanding of how people perceive and apply product elements as cues for everyday designing and level of appropriation when reusing product for the new purpose, an experiment was conducted. In the experiment, four everyday products were provided for repurpose. The 40 repurposed products from 10 participants were analyzed with the interviews and questionnaire. ED products were reborn with various purposes beyond the original functions of the products. The results indicate that there is a difference between perceived product elements as usual and product elements as cues for everyday designing. Materials and manipulability plays an important role in ED although form-centred perceptions were mainly observed. It seems that the product elements as ED cue and the prior experience of the product seem to affect the level of the product appropriation. Although this study has an exploratory character, it could provide design practitioners with a better understanding of users’ ED behaviour, which could contribute to discovering new insight of product and product sustainability.

This paper proposes a method to automatically generate a multi-domain matrix (MDM) from textual activity specifications. The format for specifying these activities is based on a structured grammar derived from natural language and consists of two types of activities: goal activities and transformation activities. A goal activity describes the purpose of an action performed by an actor for the benefit of another actor in the system. A transformation activity describes an activity from the viewpoint of a single actor, who receives, generates, and outputs information or artifacts. If one describes activities using these two types of activity specifications, dependencies can be automatically derived between actors, activities, and parameters of the system and visualized in an MDM. Thus the generated MDM presents an organization DSM (actors), a process DSM (activities), and a parameter DSM (flows of information or objects), as well as the mapping matrices coupling the different domains. An illustrative house construction example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed activity specification format. The method may provide an outcome in understanding and managing complex systems.

Sustainable products are becoming increasingly important for companies in order to succeed. However, the development of sustainable products poses a complex challenge, because alongside the classical product development requirements, additional social, economic and ecologic requirements arise. Despite the increasing relevance of this topic, sustainability is not yet fully integrated into the product development processes and mindsets within companies. Simultaneously, the integration of sustainability into engineering education is still insufficient and traditional teaching formats seem to be inadequate to teach such complex and multifaceted topics. Within this publication, the development, the contents and the implementation of two different university engineering courses for sustainability and environmentally compatible product development are described and compared. The different approaches to develop and incorporate sustainability into the engineering education and the usage of innovative teaching concepts are demonstrated to encourage and inspire other universities.

Design is multi-modal, and depending on the current stage in the process, progress can be facilitated through working in either the physical or virtual domain with frequent iterations commonly required between. Traditionally, prototyping workflows are sequential, although current trends such as Digital Twinning and Mixed Reality (MR) enable decreased domain transition times, reducing the cycle time. This leads towards fully integrated digital-physical prototypes, enabling work in both domains simultaneously by increasing synchronicity of select variables. This paper considers those variables involved, the sensors that measure them and their rate of synchronisation, thereby investigating the feasibility of MR workflow interventions, and exploring the benefits that may be realised. The paper identifies four components of MR implementations in prototyping and myriad methods by which domain transition may occur and uses these in context of a case study to propose four levels of workflow synchronisation. It was found achieving some high rates of synchronicity is possible, but achieving the highest levels as prescribed by digital twinning is neither feasible nor pragmatic against current MR capabilities and design prototyping workflows.

Academics teach engineering design based on design theory and best practices, practitioners teach design based on their experience. Is there a difference between them? There appears to be little prior work in comparing the design processes of design academics and practitioners. This paper presents a case study in which the design activity of a team of academics was compared to that of a team of practitioners. The participants’ verbalizations during team discussions were coded using the Function- Behaviour-Structure (FBS) ontology. A qualitative comparison reveals that the team of practitioners constructs the design space earlier and generally spends more time in the solution space than the team of academics. Further, the team of practitioners has a significant number of direct transitions from function (F) to structure (S), while no such transitions are observed for the team of academics. Given that this is a single case study, the results cannot be used as the basis for any generalizations on how academics and practitioners compare. This is a successful proof of methodologies that lay the foundation for a series of hypotheses to be tested in a future study.

Virtual Reality (VR) is progressively adopted at different stages of design and product development. Consequently, evolving interaction requirements in engineering design and development for VR are essential for technology adoption. One of these requirements is real-time positional tracking. This paper aims to present an experimental design of a new real-time positional tracking device (tracker), that is more compact than the existing solution, while addressing factors such as wearability and connectivity. We compare the simulation of the proposed device and the existing solution, discuss the results, and the limitations. The new experimental shape of the device is tailored towards research, allowing the engineering designer to take advantage of a new tracker alternative in new ways, and opens the door to new VR applications in research and product development.

The design of ITER, a large-scale nuclear fusion reactor, is intertwined with profound research and development efforts. Tough problems call for novel solutions, but the low maturity of those solutions can lead to unexpected problems. If designers keep solving such emergent problems in iterative design cycles, the complexity of the resulting design is bound to increase. Instead, we want to show designers the sources of emergent design problems, so they may be dealt with more effectively. We propose to model the interplay between multiple problems and solutions in a problem network. Each problem and solution is then connected to a dynamically changing engineering model, a graph of physical components. By analysing the problem network and the engineering model, we can (1) derive which problem has emerged from which solution and (2) compute the contribution of each design effort to the complexity of the evolving engineering model. The method is demonstrated for a sequence of problems and solutions that characterized the early design stage of an optical subsystem of ITER.

The availability of new research for IoT support and the human-centric perspective of industry 4.0 opens a gap to support operators in unleashing their creativity so they can provide improvements opportunities with IoT technology. This paper presents a case-study carried out in four Swedish manufacturing companies, where four different workshops were facilitated to support operators in the conceptualization of manufacturing improvements with IoT technologies. The empirical material gathered during these workshops has been analyzed in five different reflective sessions and discussed in light of previous research from industry 4.0, operators, and IoT support. Results indicate that operators can collaboratively create conceptual IoT solutions and that expressiveness in communicating their ideas and needs using IoT technology is more relevant than technical aspects and details of their proposed IoT solutions. This technological expressiveness is identified as a necessary skill to be cultivated on the shop floor and can potentially contribute to making a more effective and socially sustainable industrial landscape in the future.

One challenge with design automation is system transparency with adjustable granularity because of the many different forms of representation from multiple disciplines. Previous research has focused on visualization through the generation of graphs, packaging into electronic books, and model highlighting. The research presented in this paper focuses instead on a visual programming approach, commonly applied in the building industry, where design assets and external references are wrapped into visual components and managed on a canvas with information input/output relations displayed. This entails additional documentation efforts, but the visualization is arguably more useful as groups and levels of granularity are adjusted by the engineers themselves as a part of the development work. To explore visual programming and its potential benefits as a way of enabling transparency with adjustable granularity of DA systems within mechanical manufacturing industry, an existing textual design automation system was transformed into a visual one using Grasshopper® (a visual programming environment) and discussed with respect to DA system transparency, feature-based CAD, and DA system development.

This paper presents an introductory review of methods to articulate strategy in design. Articulation is here seen as a process in which strategy is more or less strictly and explicitly identified and described, e.g. in relation to key ideas, directions to follow, goals and expected results. The paper surveys existing literature in design research and identifies two broad categories of methods for the articulation of strategy: (1) structured frameworks, and (2) vocabularies and principles.

As an outcome of the multi-criteria evaluation of different alternatives, product developers receive information on whether the evaluation alternatives meet the demanded property profile. If not, product characteristic and property changes are required, which can have desired and undesired effects. This contribution presents an MBSE-based approach, which extends the relational requirement model by value functions and product properties. Its novelty can be found in the integration of multi-criteria decision models, which are used to improve alternatives based on property change impact analyses.

In an increasingly interconnected world, changes of uncertain nature and impact affect the functioning of human societies that depend on health, ecological, and economic systems. The proposed framework for systems-of-systems resilience explains ways of accommodating and responding to these challenges while encompassing the interfaces of the health, environment, and economy domains and their effect on communities. Resilience is defined as a continuous process and we distinguish between four system properties, five resilience capacities, and a variety of system activities.

There are three approaches to studying designers – through their cognitive profile, design behaviors, and design artifacts (e.g., quality). However, past work has rarely considered all three data domains together. Here we introduce and describe a framework for a comprehensive approach to engineering design, and discuss how the insights may benefit engineering design research and education. To demonstrate the proposed framework, we conducted an empirical study with a solar energy system design problem. Forty-six engineering students engaged in a week-long computer-aided design challenge that assessed their design behavior and artifacts, and completed a set of psychological tests to measure cognitive competencies. Using a machine learning approach consisting of k-means, hierarchical, and spectral clustering, designers were grouped by similarities on the psychological tests. Significant differences were revealed between designer groups in their sequential design behavior, suggesting that a designer's cognitive profile is related to how they engage in the design process.

Introducing more customized products causes complexity costs, which are hard to estimate and measure. Researchers and practitioners have therefore developed approaches to measure these costs. This paper reviews the current approaches and reveals a lack of a holistic view on the underlying problem and, hence, deficits to certain economic questions. We therefore suggest using the Extended Axiomatic Design (EAD) framework as an interdisciplinary model that adresses the economic consequences of variety-induced complexity.

In this paper, a proposal for a new method to design load-adaptive microlattice structures for PBF-LB/M manufacturing is presented. For this purpose, a method was developed to stiffen microlattice structures in particular by using self-similar sub-cells to ensure their manufacturability. The quality of the stiffness increase was investigated and verified by finite element simulations. Subsequently, the simulation results were critically discussed with respect to their potential for future design processes for architected materials.

This study explores challenges in decision-making for product design due to insufficient cost transparency because of product variety across the value chain. Utilizing a literature review and a case study on a company, it delves into issues such as value chain consideration, product family assessment, linking effects to specific product levels, and converting measured effects. Highlighting the critical need to address these challenges for decision-making. Future research should focus on a comprehensive costing framework, explore effect interdependencies, and expand the value chain analysis.

The study presented in this paper investigated the impact of embodied and self-reflected virtual reality (VR) experiences on engineering design students' cognition and perception of nature-relatedness during the early conceptual design phase. Results showed that students who explored the design environment as a bird (embodied) or human (self) avatar were significantly more likely to explore a larger design space indicated by more semantically unique design concepts compared to students without the VR experience. Network graphs of the syntactic connection of design concepts revealed notable differences among the three groups. The bird avatar group showed more connections to nature-related and social concepts, while more technical concepts were central for the human avatar group, and concepts about money were more central to the control group. Finally, students who embodied the bird avatar had a significantly stronger perception of connection to nature compared to the human avatar and control group, with a small to medium effect size. The results suggest that embodied (as a bird) and self-reflected (as a human) VR experiences can enhance engineering students' design thinking and perception of connection to nature.

Tension chording is a lightweight design principle in the human motion system. More muscles than necessary are available in this system to generate motion. By using these redundant muscles the principle contributes to the lightweight design of the motion segments. The lightweight design benefits of the principle for technical structures loaded with bending torques were shown in prior studies. This paper presents a pilot study on lightweight design benefits of using tension chording for torsion loaded structures.