Autogenetic Design Theory: A Contribution to an Extended Design Theory

Author(s):  
Sándor Vajna ◽  
Tibor Bercsey ◽  
Steffen Clement ◽  
Peter Mack

Abstract Based on an analysis of the product development process and the study of relevant product development models, the paper presents a new approach aiming at modeling and supporting the design activity as the substantial activity within the product development process. The Autogenetic Design Theory is an approach advancing general design theories. It facilitates the integration of intuition, creativity and artificial intelligence into the conventional design process. To this end, a phase-like allocation of the design process is assumed as the essential structure and an evolutionary algorithm is integrated as the core facilitating purposeful searching and combining. Hence, the flow of the design process can be influenced as all requirements can be included and, on the other hand, intuition and creativity are ensured through the evolutionary algorithm.

Author(s):  
Sa´ndor Vajna ◽  
Steffen Clement ◽  
Andre´ Jordan

The paper presents a new approach aiming at modeling and supporting the design activity as the substantial activity within the product development process. The Autogenetic Design Theory facilitates the integration of intuition, creativity and artificial intelligence into the conventional design process. To this end, a phase-like allocation of the design process is assumed as the essential structure and an evolutionary algorithm is integrated as the core facilitating purposeful searching and combining. Hence, the flow of the design process can be influenced as all requirements can be included and, on the other hand, intuition and creativity are ensured through the evolutionary algorithm. The example of the shift fork, which was described in the paper, shows how ADT can support variant design. Next steps will include the application of the ADT to the other types of design. The optimisation of the shift fork was the first step towards a computer-based implementation of the ADT.


Author(s):  
Andrea CAPRA ◽  
Ana BERGER ◽  
Daniela SZABLUK ◽  
Manuela OLIVEIRA

An accurate understanding of users' needs is essential for the development of innovative products. This article presents an exploratory method of user centered research in the context of the design process of technological products, conceived from the demands of a large information technology company. The method is oriented - but not restricted - to the initial stages of the product development process, and uses low-resolution prototypes and simulations of interactions, allowing users to imagine themselves in a future context through fictitious environments and scenarios in the ambit of ideation. The method is effective in identifying the requirements of the experience related to the product’s usage and allows rapid iteration on existing assumptions and greater exploration of design concepts that emerge throughout the investigation.


Author(s):  
Asko Ellman ◽  
Petter Krus

Establishing product requirements for the customer is usually the first step in the product development process. Indeed, identifying and fulfilling customer requirements is the key for successful product development. However, satisfying all the customer requirements is not always possible. Therefore, the best design is the design that fulfils a set of the most important customer requirements. Due to this, design process needs to be agile and iterative. Design and its requirements need to be effectively iterated.


Author(s):  
Sarayut Nonsiri ◽  
Eric Coatanea ◽  
Mohamed Bakhouya

The scheduling of the design activities in product development process is a crucial step in early stages in order to achieve the project in time and cost-effective manner. In complex product development process, many dependency relationships or feedback loop could exist between design activities with multiple technical domains. Sequencing the design activities is a decision making process in order to reduce these feedback loops, and therefore, reduce amount of required information flows between activities. In recent years, methods for sequencing the design activities in design process have been proposed in order to reduce lead-time development and cost. The purpose of this research work is to present a methodology for design process sequencing in product development project by using Design Structure Matrix (DSM) for visualization a complex process and Discrete Differential Evolution (DDE) for sequencing the design tasks. The tests performed in this article have shown that this approach provides very competitive results in term of the quality of obtained solutions when compared to Genetic algorithms (GA). In additional it is a simple, effective and easy to use since the amount of control parameters to set is reduced.


Author(s):  
David G. Meeker ◽  
Anna C. Thornton

Abstract One cannot design in a vacuum; the goodness of a product is almost always (except in the case of a novel design) measured with respect to an existing design. It is logical, therefore, to have a design process that takes competitors into account. Competitor’s hardware is a rich source of design information providing concept and design solutions, current market trends, cost and quality drivers, missing functionality and unwanted functionality. This paper presents a methodology to systematically evaluate existing designs using a process called benchmarking. In addition, a methodology for incorporating the benchmark information into the specification, concept, embodiment, detail design phases of the product development process is described.


Author(s):  
Gregory M. Roach ◽  
Jordan J. Cox ◽  
Jared M. Young

A major challenge in industry today is to reduce the cost and cycle time in product development while maintaining enough flexibility to adapt to changing markets. Businesses are requiring more and more flexibility in order to produce custom goods at low cost. A new strategy called the Product Design Generator is presented to provide flexible product platforms through an automated design process where product variation is built into the product development process and is achieved through scalable and in some instances modular parametric models for a given product platform embodiment. A case study of web-based Product Design Generator is presented. The axial turbine disk Product Design Generator demonstrated cycle time reduction from 500 man hours to 15 minutes. This new product development strategy has demonstrated the potential to provide engineers the ability to study more potential design solutions, reduce the number of opportunities to introduce error in the product development process, and allows companies to apply a consistent design process across the organization.


Author(s):  
Marco Rossoni ◽  
Giorgio Colombo ◽  
Luca Bergonzi

Current trends in product development process highlight the increasing adoption of digital data and virtual processes. Nowadays, a huge amount of product data are collected without a clear management strategy and, oftentimes, they dont even cover the whole product development process. A global and integrated planning about information needed to sustain product design process is not a trivial task and, usually, companies underrates this issue. From the perspective of virtualization of processes, and then their automation, the lack of structured knowledge is certainly awful. This paper aims at making a critical analysis how product data evolve throughout the product design or configuration process and how they impact the product development activities. Efficient digital product twin allows companies to virtualize processes and leverage their automation, but it is important to understand how the knowledge management should be carried out. Three case studies, directly experienced by the authors, have been investigated analyzing digital data and virtual tools that allow companies to automate the design process, each one bringing a peculiar perspective of the problem.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inayat Ullah ◽  
Dunbing Tang ◽  
Qi Wang ◽  
Leilei Yin ◽  
Ishfaq Hussain

Product redesign is not a straightforward task, specifically for complex commodities. Engineering change requirements can be evoked in any phase of the product development process, thus making engineering change management a challenging task. The motive of this study is to explore the best possible way of managing engineering change requirements taking execution sequence of change requirements into consideration. In this article, a new approach supporting engineering change requirements implementation sequence, by considering the risk associated with engineering changes, is presented. The risk of the redesign is hard to foresee since the engineering change effects are being dispersed from the instigating component to other associated components. In this article, the term of rework-risk is used for the amount of rework needed to be done to redesign the products’ components. The practicality of suggested method is analyzed using the redesign of an optical mouse as a case study. Managing engineering change requirements in a group with proper sequence can ensue with a 15% decrease in the redesign duration as compared with the prompt implementation of engineering change requirements. Conversely, it can also cause 36.23% increase in the redesign duration, if not handled in an appropriate sequence. The results from a single, simple case, indicates that running engineering change requirement batches can be beneficial.


Author(s):  
Petter Krus ◽  
Johan Andersson

Design optimization is becoming and increasingly important tool for design. In order to have an impact on the product development process it must permeate all levels of the design in such a way that a holistic view is maintained through all stages of the design. The design process can be viewed as a process of increasing the information of the finished product. Design optimization is on one hand a part of the design process, but can also be used as a metaphor for the whole design process. In this paper an information theoretical approach is taken to establish a performance criterion for an optimization method. Furthermore, this approach is extended do describe the design process.


Author(s):  
Stefan Schork ◽  
Eckhard Kirchner

AbstractPrototypes are often used as a tool in the product development process and their usage is advised in many guidelines, frameworks and product development methods. Those prototypes achieve different goals of which most relate to getting new insights and information about the product in development. For the development of those prototypes however, significantly less development methods are available compared to the number of methods for the development of products. Investigating the process of using a prototype leads to the idea that the main purpose of those prototypes is describable as learning about the product. This idea is elaborated further and followed by the introduction of the detailed process model for prototyping which is primarily based on the detailed process model for products. However, the purpose of the prototype differs from the purpose of the product which leads to some significant changes of the model. To give an example of a prototyping process, the development of a sensor- integrating elastic claw coupling is introduced and analysed. In addition, this paper discusses the question, how other product development models may be applied to the development of prototypes.


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