Concurrent Engineering

Performing modularization of a product family with multiple brands is a complex task that must integrate and balance a wide range of contradicting and ambiguous aspects, such as product performance, customer expectations, supplier alliances, and corporate business strategies. Furthermore, decisions on balancing these aspects that also change with time have to deal with a high degree of uncertainty. No general methodology for modular branding has currently been published. A methodology with that aim is proposed and prototyped in a real but anonymized industrial case. The presented task is to select standard original equipment manufacturer engines for six brands of self-propelled walk-behind lawn mowers. Selection is based on a set of calculated utility scores and known costs. The utility of an engine with a certain performance level and set of features is specific to each brand. This article presents a first step in developing a general methodology for modular branding and the organizational learnings of using the proposed methodology in an industrial setting.

Quality function deployment is an efficient and powerful tool in design, development, and planning of products. The main function of quality function deployment is conversion of VOC to technical characteristics or voice of designer. However, it is not always easy to prioritize and assess technical characteristics during the total mass of information from the different customer attitudes. This article provides a methodology for the development of an intelligent quality function deployment based on fuzzy inference system in order to capture information through house of quality. As quality function deployment integrates different components of design and development, intelligent quality function deployment would be the best replacement for human expertise and can support decision-makers in wide range of design and development. This methodology applied on a classic sample for the design of a new undergraduate curriculum in an engineering department of a university as an illustrative example shows capability of this method. This article is composed of the background of quality function deployment, review of related research works, and representation of an intelligent system for analyzing it.

Technological advances in the last decade have influenced changes in the design and engineering industries on a global scale. Lean and collaborative product development are approaches increasingly adopted by the industry and seen as the core of product lifecycle management. These trends have created the need for new skilled professionals, and universities should adapt their curricula in response. There is an increased need for academia to work with industry in order to meet these challenges. This article reports on the Parametric Technology Corporation Academic Research Symposium held in April 2011. The topics were centred around understanding the essence of product lifecycle management and its impact on design and engineering education. Furthermore, examples of implementing product lifecycle management and collaborative practices in higher education were presented from the United States and France. This article concludes with a discussion of the recommendations made at the symposium for the future development and support of key skills across university curricula.

Form attractiveness is an important catalyst driving consumer preference for a particular product. However, a designer faces two major difficulties when attempting to enhance the attractiveness of a product form. First, consumer perception regarding form attractiveness involves a number of different intricate psychological and circumstantial evaluation bases. Second, variability exists between different consumer’s perceptions of the same product form. This study treats the task of satisfying consumer needs/desires for product form as a multi-objective design activity and develops a product form optimization method, which combines the Taguchi method with the TOPSIS algorithm. A case study involving the design of a passenger car form targeted at a particular consumer group is presented to demonstrate the operational procedure involved in the proposed method and to verify its performance. The results of the verification experiments confirm that the optimized design has a higher attractiveness in terms of each evaluation basis and results in a more consistent consumer evaluation than the non-optimized designs. The method proposed in this study is straightforward to implement and provide an effective means of reducing the time and costs associated with product form design.

Interface definitions are important in complex system design because they contribute to the definition and satisfaction of functional flows. Design structure matrix approaches have only recently focused on supporting the challenge of integrating possible interface types in conceptual design. We propose a physical interface data model to define the interface design space and thus support interface definition. This data model is integrated into the system architecture definitions and uses shared design parameters to detect risk and conflicts in collaborative design. A case study in an oil industry has been conducted to test the proposed approach and define difficulties in the implementation phase.

The aim of the concurrent product realisation and quality assurance of products is to shorten the realisation time, reduce realisation costs, increase the quality of products and thus increase customer satisfaction. In a case study of a project of the concurrent realisation of products (components for the automotive industry), it is shown how the requirements of quality standards for the automotive industry can be integrated in processes of the concurrent product realisation project, based on track-and-loop principle and three strategies: parallelness, standardisation and integration. This article gives an overview of quality-related standards in the automotive industry, the principles of sequential and concurrent product realisation and the course of concurrent product realisation and quality assurance of products in the automotive industry. Five loops of concurrent product realisation processes are defined for the automotive industry, as well as seven milestones of advanced product quality planning. A course of concurrent realisation and quality assurance of products in the automotive industry is shown in the case of the concurrent realisation of a car component.

Scheduling is one of the most important functions in managing industrial production. This article deals with the scheduling for the flow-shop production system planning by presenting a model that uses the framework of multiple criteria and multiple constraint levels ( M C 2 ) linear programming, aiming at advancing the adaptation of the model to the situation when there are more than one decision makers in the system. At first, a flow-shop production system planning model with multiple constraint levels is proposed considering fluctuation in resource constraints such as the investment constraint and time constraint. Then, an improved algorithm is proposed. Finally, an example about production scheduling of an actual production is given, and the computational results are presented.