Early Stage Digital Twins for Early Stage Engineering Design

ABSTRACTWhile extensive modelling - both physical and virtual - is imperative to develop right-first-time products, the parallel use of virtual and physical models gives rise to two interrelated issues: the lack of revision control for physical prototypes; and the need for designers to manually inspect, measure, and interpret modifications to either virtual or physical models, for subsequent update of the other. The Digital Twin paradigm addresses similar problems later in the product life-cycle, and while these digital twins, or the “twinning” process, have shown significant value, there is little work to date on their implementation in the earlier design stages. With large prospective benefits in increased product understanding, performance, and reduced design cycle time and cost, this paper explores the concept of using the Digital Twin in early design, including an introduction to digital twinning, examination of opportunities for and challenges of their implementation, a presentation of the structure of Early Stage Twins, and evaluation via two implementation cases.

Roadmap to Consider Physiological and Psychological Aspects of User-product Interactions in Virtual Product Engineering

To successfully facilitate user-centred design, a multitude of different aspects has to be considered, from purely physiological to psychological-emotional factors. The overall aim is to increase the customer satisfaction by enhancing the fit between products and their users in the respective context of use. Further virtualisation of user-centred design processes holds the potential to convey the concepts of frontloading and predictive engineering from classical product engineering. Our vision is to facilitate a comprehensive consideration of user-product interactions in virtual product engineering operationalised by the mission to develop methods and tools to assess and design user-product interactions according to physiological and psychological aspects. A variety of work has already been done to model musculoskeletal user groups, to configure, predict, simulate and optimise physical user-product interactions, to integrate such models into CAD or to map individual subjective values to product design. Nevertheless, there are still research areas to be addressed to enable a comprehensive implementation of the mentioned approach. These are discussed in the present contribution.

Towards an Approach Integrating Various Levels of Data Analytics to Exploit Product-Usage Information in Product Development

By applying data analytics to product usage information (PUI) from combinations of different channels, companies can get a more complete picture of their products’ and services’ Mid-Of-Life. All data, which is gathered within the usage phase of a product and which relates to a more comprehensive understanding of the usability of the product itself, can become valuable input. Nevertheless, an efficient use of such knowledge requires to setup related analysis capabilities enabling users not only to visualize relevant data, but providing development related knowledge e.g. to predict product behaviours not yet reflected by initial requirements.The paper elaborates on explorations to support product development with analytics to improve anticipation of future usage of products and related services. The discussed descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics in given research context share the idea and overarching process of getting knowledge out of PUI data. By implementation of corresponding features into an open software platform, the application of advanced analytics for white goods product development has been explored as a reference scenario for PUI exploitation.

Sequential Updating of Quantitative Requirements for Increased Flexibility in Robust Systems Design

In early development stages of complex systems, interacting subsystems (including components) are often designed simultaneously by distributed teams with limited information exchange. Distributed development becomes possible by assigning teams independent design goals expressed as quantitative requirements equipped with tolerances to provide flexibility for design: so-called solution-spaces are high-dimensional sets of permissible subsystem properties on which requirements on the system performance are satisfied. Edges of box-shaped solution spaces are permissible intervals serving as decoupled (mutually independent) requirements for subsystem design variables. Unfortunately, decoupling often leads to prohibitively small intervals. In so-called solution-compensation spaces, permissible intervals for early-decision variables are increased by a compensation mechanism using late-decision variables. This paper presents a multi-step development process where groups of design variables successively change role from early-decision to late-decision type in order to maximize flexibility. Applying this to a vehicle chassis design problem demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach.

Reflection-in-Action When Designing Organizational Processes: Prototyping Workshops for Collective Reflection-in-Action

In this paper on designing organizational processes, we combine insight on reflection-in-action with the role of reflection and experimenting from the organizational routine dynamics literature. Illustrated through a case at a strategy consultancy, we show how a prototyped workshop can elicit reflection-in- action when designing organizational processes. The artifacts used in the prototyped workshop made previous implicit assumptions about the work more explicit. This led to on the spot reflection-in-action of how to improve the prototype. This shows how collective reflection-action can be created by creating a space for reflection, that simultaneously allows for experimentation. Future research between design science and organizational science would thus be fruitful when studying the role of collective reflection- in-action when prototyping organizational processes.

Impact of Generational Commonality of Short-Life Cycle Products in Manufacturing and Remanufacturing Processes

Short-life cycle products are frequently replaced and discarded despite being resource-intensive. The short life span and the low utilization rate of the end-of-life products cause severe environmental problems and waste of resources. In the case of short-life cycle products, a new generation of products is released sooner than other products, therefore there are the opportunities to have various generations of products during the remanufacturing process. The commonality between generations increases the intergenerational component compatibility, which increases the efficiency of the manufacturing and remanufacturing processes, while at the same time weakening the performance difference between generations. This paper proposes a mathematical model to investigate the effect of commonality among generations on the overall production process. Based on various given new generation product designs with different commonality, we aim to propose optimal production planning and pricing strategies to maximize the total profitability and investigate how the results vary according to the commonality strategies between product generations.

Design Considerations for Therapeutic Devices - An Investigation of Pre-Schoolers’ Preferences for an Artefact’s Basic Characteristics

Toys are children's first consumer products and while playing they acquire numerous skills, learn about their environment and socialise with other children and adults. Toys are adapted and used by clinicians as therapeutic devices because they allow them to create bonds and communicate with children. Aesthetical aspects should be considered early in the design process, especially since pre-schoolers’ views are still dominated by the appearance of artefacts, also known as, the perceptual salient characteristics. The study of emotions mediates the understanding of the relationships between a product, user and the process with which consumers set up preferences over products. Decisions taken in each design stage will influence whether therapeutic devices will be enjoyed by children. An experiment was carried out to test out pre-schoolers’ preferences on individual attributes: form, dimension, material (hardness and weight) and surface (appearance and texture). This study exposed dominant characteristic preferences and the fact that some are influenced by gender and age. Employing these findings in therapeutic devices will enable clinicians to better engage the children during therapy.

Cascading Forgetting in Product Development Challenges and Evaluation

Vast amounts of information and knowledge is produced and stored within product design projects. Especially for reuse and adaptation there exists no suitable method for product designers to handle this information overload. Due to this, the selection of relevant information in a specific development situation is time-consuming and inefficient. To tackle this issue, the novel approach Intentional Forgetting (IF) is applied for product design, which aims to support reuse and adaptation by reducing the vast amount of information to the relevant. Within this contribution an IF-operator called Cascading Forgetting is introduced and evaluated, which was implemented for forgetting related information elements in ontology knowledge bases. For the evaluation the development process of a test-rig for studying friction and wear behaviour of the cam/tappet contact in combustion engines is analysed. Due to the interdisciplinary task of the evaluation and the characteristics of semantic model, challenges are discussed. In conclusion, the focus of the evaluation is to consider how reliable the Cascading Forgetting works and how intuitive ontology-based representations appear to engineers.

Experimentation Throughout the Product Development Process - Lessons from Food and Beverage Ventures

Established companies turn to new ventures for bolstering exploration activities, but we know relatively little of the product development processes of startups and new ventures and how different stakeholders are utilized in these. The current study investigated the product development activities and experiments of eight Finnish food and beverage ventures in a multiple case study based on 22 interviews. How the developed products fit into the existing portfolio and experience of the ventures seemed to define their enacted development process. Internal experimentation was a constant feature, although the type of experiments varied between different phases of the development process. External-facing experiments were less frequent and more for validation than concept generation. On the other hand, they also carried important market creation functionalities. The results suggest that more nuanced terminology around experimentation would be useful to determine what type of experiments serve different goals in the development process.

Biomimicry Design Education Essentials

The emerging field of biomimicry and learning to design with and for nature has expanded in recent years through a diversity of educational programs. Inspiration following natural forms may give the appearance of being sustainable, but the question remains, how sustainable is it? Misunderstanding the function of these forms may leave designers with products not as sustainable as desired. Biomimicry education addresses these issues by integrating three essential elements into their design thinking phases and by using analogical transfer while doing so. This field learns from nature as model, nature as measure, and nature as mentor, throughout the design process. Through examination, analyses and verification of students designs and reflective processes at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, this research considers natures analogies in educational factors, determining which elements are influential when incorporating biomimicry into design education.