Biologically inspired design

This paper reviews research on biologically inspired design, and has three main parts. The first part surveys examples relevant to three groupings of manufacturing research. The second part presents general methods that support biomimetic design, including different approaches for the steps involved in identifying and applying relevant biological analogies for any given problem. The third part details examples that illustrate the use of a general biomimetic design method, which identifies analogies from natural-language biological information. Finally, insights and conclusions are drawn and synthesized.     

Agent Based Negotiation for Collaborative Design Decision Making

Complex design involves trade-offs and teamwork. To make collaborative design decisions, designers must negotiate with each other to resolve their discrepancies through exploring the design space, generating new ideas and compromising for agreement. Advances in negotiation research have been made in social psychology, distributed artificial intelligence, and decision theory. But few have been applied to design. Built on existing negotiation research, we are developing an agent based negotiation framework to support collaborative design decision-making. This paper presents the negotiation protocol, information models, and negotiation strategies of the framework followed by discussion of an application case example.     

Biomimetics Applied to Centering in Microassembly

This paper describes the application of a biomimetic search method to develop Ideas for centering objects in microassembly. Biomimetics involves the imitation of biological phenomena to solve problems. An obstacle to the use of biomimetics in engineering is knowledge of biological phenomena that are relevant to the problem at hand. The method described here starts with an engineering problem, and then systematically searches for analogous biological phenomena using functional keywords. This method is illustrated by finding and using analogies for the problem of positioning and centering objects during microassembly. Relevant phenomena identified Involve microtubule organizing centers, photosystems, and retinal ganglion cells.     

Improving system performance through an integrated design approach

Product designers typically use existing concept solutions in their day-to-day business and development generally takes place via incremental improvements leaving little room for innovation. This study aims to improve system performance by an integrated design approach. The approach encompasses three phases: technology assimilation, technology insertion and technology integration, following a sequence of modular, top-down and bottom-up design strategies. The goal is to find opportunities to integrate structure and functionality early in the conceptual stage to increase production efficiency and reduce cost. This paper describes the integrated design approach; also, practical results are presented where the developed approach was successfully applied.     

焊管轧辊设计新方法

采用KBE（基于知识的工程）技术,将轧辊设计的相关知识和设计人员在长期工作中积累的经验运用到轧辊设计中,建立了基于知识的轧辊设计系统的框架体系和轧辊设计的知识库,开发了基于知识的焊管轧辊设计系统。提高了轧辊设计的智能化程度以及设计的质量和效率,减少了设计对设计人员经验的依赖。     

Augmented Reality Aided Assembly Design and Planning

This paper presents a methodology that integrates the assembly Product Design and Planning (PDP) activities with the Workplace Design and Planning (WDP) activities to improve the efficiency and quality of assembly design and planning at the early design stage. This methodology is implemented in an augmented reality (AR) assembly environment, where engineers can design and plan a product assembly and its assembly sequence through manipulating virtual prototypes in a real assembly workplace. In this AR environment, WDP information are fed back to the designers and engineers in real-time to aid them in making better decisions in assembly design and planning.     

Part cost estimation at early design phase

Although 70% of part cost is determined during the early design stage, designers rarely accurately estimate the costs of their designs. Based on extensive literature review, in-depth industrial survey and close collaboration with multiple manufacturers, forty factors were identified as governing part cost and ranked according to cost impact. Based on parameter ranking and availability at the early stages of design, a cost estimator for designers is proposed. As the design progresses and more parameters become available, a more accurate cost model is derived and proposed to manufacturers. Results are analyzed and compared to actual manufacturing costing demonstrating good fit.     

Open-architecture products

This paper defines open-architecture products (OAPs), a new class of products comprising a fixed platform and modules that can be added and swapped. Customers can adapt OAPs to their needs by integrating modules into the platform. Manufacturers will produce these platforms, while new small companies and customers will develop the modules, thus increasing employment and causing the economy to flourish. At the same time OAPs will provide consumers with the product they desire. Challenges include developing new OAP design software for non-professional designers and new assembly systems to facilitate economical assembly of a large number of product variants.     

Maintaining design intent for aircraft manufacture

Design and manufacture of aircraft requires deep multi-disciplinary understanding of system behaviour. The intention of the designer can get lost due to the many changes occurring to the product and the inability of the methods and tools used to capture it. Systems engineering and optimisation tools underpin industrial approaches to design, but are not without issue. The challenge is to find a route from concept to manufacture which enables designers to maintain their original intent. The novelty in this work is that the parameterisation used to build the CAD model reflects the manufacturing capability, ensuring design intent is maintained from concept to manufacture.     

End-of-Life-Based Negotiation Throughout the Design Process

The aim of this paper is to suggest a methodology to accommodate a preferred end-of-life scenario in the early phases of a product. Life-cycle engineering and DFE methods have tried to improve design from an environmental point of view. But they failed to provide product designers with both levers on usable product characteristics and strategic objectives. The situation-based approach proposed focuses on negotiation of end-of-life strategies and their impact on product characteristics throughout the product development phase. It is based on the way negotiation between product engineer and end-of-life strategy engineer can be prepared, then performed and controlled.     

Method for supporting conflict resolution for efficient PSS development

A method is proposed to enable service designers to identify existing conflicts in design solutions and to develop basic strategies to solve them. For this purpose, two different approaches for detecting conflicts are introduced: one entails the use of lexical expressions of functions, and the other involves the ranges of design parameters. In the remainder of this paper, the authors describe a detailed process to identify conflicts in design solutions and to develop strategies for resolving them by applying the proposed methods in an actual service case. The proposed method is expected to lead to an improvement in the efficiency of PSS development.     

Method to explore technology innovation fully exploiting in-house capabilities

This paper proposes a design method to seek potential product innovation fully exploiting in-house capabilities. The method triggers scientists, designers and engineers in discovering both new instantiations of physical principles and new physical phenomena that may appear by modifying the embodiment of existing technologies. The embodiment modifications are constrained by the in-house manufacturing techniques to seek innovative solutions without the burden of heavy capital investments. The newly discovered principles and phenomena are tested for possible affordances leading to new product functions. The design method is applied in an industrial technology exploration and led to the discovery of two new technologies.     

Working situation model for safety integration during design phase

The fact that the design of equipment and machines can no longer be separated from the concept of human safety has led to the definition of criteria which is linked to the equipment's exploitation and must be taken into account during their design. Firstly, this paper looks at the problem of integrating safety into design as early as possible, reviews the state of the art and examines the research carried out on this subject to date. The area of application of our research is then presented. The production system analyzed is an offset printing line. We propose a system model by defining the working situation and the elements characterizing this situation as well as the concepts relative to these elements. The model is presented and the method is illustrated by the results of an experiment carried out in the design department of an industrial partner. The ultimate aim is to provide designers with the means of integrating information about the potential work context into the equipment's design process from the onset.     

Compatibility Measurement in Collaborative Conceptual Design

A product consists of various sub-functions elaborated by alternative design principles which results in many combinations. In collaborative design, designers expect that their preferences over the combinations be respected during the combination process of sub-functions, resulting in compatible combinations. We formulate the selection of compatible combinations as a combinatorial problem by: (i) defining a design principle as a list of variables with their domain and direction of designer's preferences, (ii) considering constraints among design principles, (iii) characterizing the compatibility level of combinations. A vacuum cleaner is considered with dust bag, plastic bin or cyclonic design principles for the dust collection sub-function.     

Thick composite design for hydrogen vessels: A contribution to composite design method

Hydrogen stock vessels add new product specifications because of higher pressure use. Today static application leads up to 700 bars. But pressure devices must resist, because of certification, at 3 times pressure (2100 bars). Composite vessels give material–structure potential solutions. But designers face limits of knowledge due to actual good practices of thick composite structures use. This paper presents levels of knowledge enrichment for designers (multi-scale experiments and models), analysis of process influence on models improvement, and a discussion for an efficient testing strategy (meaning virtual testing in order to reduce the number of tests and their costs).     

Two design problems identified in consumer product recalls: Degradation over extended use and scarce FR-coupling

One hundred recalls of consumer products, e.g., home electronics, in the Japanese market identified two design problems; aging degradation causing failure to meet functional requirements (FR) over extended use and scarce FR-coupling failure that affect meeting other FRs. The former was found in 22% of the recalls with products used over 10 years. The designer could not foresee the long-term degradation in plastic or insulator. The latter contributed to 66% with an extremely low failure rate of less than 0.01% of all production. Rare design error affected by secondary FRs like cooling or friction is another hard-to-notice factor for designers.     

The Use of Virtual Reality Techniques during the Design Process: from the Functional Definition of the Product to the Design of its Structure

During the design process, designers have to define the structure of their product while considering its functional definition. This design phase remains little assisted for designers. In addition, as numerous options can be considered for the end of life of a product (reuse, remanufacturing, recycling,…) it becomes more difficult to obtain a compromise concerning the final structure of the product. In this paper, we will show how the use of virtual reality helps designers to transform the functional definition of the product into the design of its structure, during the conceptual design phase. The developed example will concern the design of a bathroom scale.