The digitalization of the Industry is one of the megatrends taking place, but many companies struggle to follow this trend. The main reason is the absence of simple solutions for the integration of sensory functions, which are applicable to the existing system. Therefore, this paper discusses the aspects of simplicity in the context of integrating sensory functions into existing systems, to support the development of digitalized products.

Two general requirements can be formulated for a solution to be applicable simple: The first requirement is affected by the product structure. The solution must affect the least possible amount of modules and must not interfere with the interfaces of the modular platform. The second requirement is affected by the effort to model the behaviour of the desired information and the possible data a sensory function is delivering. The effort to develop a reliable solution has to be compared with the commercial potential of the solution.

To consider the mentioned requirements, the paper explains three approaches to assess the simplicity of solutions on an example of the desired monitoring of the functions of a rotary plug valve.

Product-Service Systems (PSS) have emerged as a key concept to meet the societal and market trends of increasing customer needs through the entire life-cycle. Unfortunately, several companies are struggling with getting revenues from service investments and translating 'real needs' to design improvements. The demand of the designer to go beyond the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is evident. This paper aims to map the interventions proposed by research in the area of PSS and VoC. Using a systematic mapping approach, the research domain was analyzed with regards to context and interventions. The results show a progressive development in the research area with a focus on the specification and realization of needs. A gap exists in connecting the engineers with 'real needs' and integrating the customer as a natural part of the entire development cycle of a PSS. By performing a systematic mapping, future research can be more focused and hopefully increasing its impact.

Open source hardware is hardware whose design is shared online so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell it. In spite of the increasing popularity of this alternative IP management approach, the field of OSH remains fragmented of diverse practices seeking for settlement. This challenges providers of groupware solutions to capture the specific needs of open source product development practitioners. This contribution therefore delivers a list of basic requirements and verifies them by comparing offered functions of existing groupware solutions.

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.

Machine Learning (ML) techniques are showing increasing use and value in the engineering sector. Object Detection methods, by which an ML system identifies objects from an image presented to it, have demonstrated promise for search and retrieval and synchronised physical/digital version control, amongst many applications.

However, accuracy of detection often decreases as the number of objects considered by the system increases which, combined with very high training times and computational overhead, makes widespread use infeasible.

This work presents a hierarchical ML workflow that leverages the pre-existing taxonometric structures of engineering components and abundant digital models (CAD) to streamline training and increase accuracy. With a two-layer structure, the approach demonstrates potential to increase accuracy to >90%, with potential time savings of 75% and greatly increased flexibility and expandability.

While further refinement is required to increase robustness of detection and investigate scalability, the approach shows significant promise to increase feasibility of Object Detection techniques in engineering.

PLM systems are key enabling systems in the development of today's products. Introduction of a new PLM capability is an expensive and risky undertaking. Many implementation projects end in tears in the sense that they are frequently late or even cancelled. In this paper, a federated PLM architecture pattern – Genesis – is introduced and evaluated against prevalent PLM approaches. From an architecture perspective, Genesis with its two distinct integration tiers decrease the number of integration points and thus cost and complexity.

There is an inherent tension between functional descriptions of products and structural descriptions. Traditionally system architecture combine the two, by mapping system elements to functions. In this process fundamental decisions about the embodiment of a product are often taken without proper scrutiny. Axiomatic design advocates a zigzag between functional decomposition and system break down. While this approach makes sense for ab initio design these are rare and most products are developed incrementally., This paper takes up the idea of a functional reference architecture.

Conventional functional modelling advocates a hierarchical decomposition into sub function. By contrast FRAs decompose function into function chain, i.e., dependent sequences of sub function required to carry out an overall function. This allows the identification of common sub-functions in different chains, and thereby generates a lattice structure of functions rather than a tree. This enables a detailed but solution neutral description of the product.

This concept has attracted interest in industry but does not have many tools and methods to develop FRA. The paper discusses some of the areas that require research

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.

Caused by the technology of automated driving the user is temporarily released from driving and can perform non-driving-related tasks (NDRTs), such as sleeping or working. The aim of this paper is to describe the geometrical interdependencies between NDRTs and different vehicle types, to be able to integrate them in the geometric package of the early phase of the vehicle conception. To address the objective a literature based study of existing approaches for vehicle conception and NDRT-studies was carried out. Additionally interviews with n=15 experts from the automotive conception department and a databased analysis of n=259 vehicles was conducted. Based on these investigations 91 geometrical characteristics for NDRTs and vehicle types werde determined and combined through a matrix-based approach. By analysing the approach highly connected characteristics such as the torso angle were identified and equations were set up to describe the relations. The approach can be used for different NDRTs such as relaxing and working and different vehicle types such as sporty cars or SUVs in order to integrate them into the package.

Education for Sustainable Development requires raising individuals' awareness of problems relevant to the environment. We designed a Generative Toolkit that supports industrial design students carrying out a Speculative Design task and through this process initiates greater problem awareness of low metal recycling rates. In this paper we give insights into the Toolkit's theoretical derivation and the design process. Findings from testing suggest that there are several opportunities for improvement, such as considering further content-related competencies in the Toolkit's design.

Maintenance is an essential aspect to keeping production facilities running and safe. However, without an overview of the maintenance impact on production, gaining clarification of the impact of maintenance is difficult. This paper introduces modularization of maintenance based on the dimensions of maintenance: physical, action, and process. The approach is applied in a case study where maintenance decisions are improved and faster than prior to the introduction of the modularized maintenance.

This paper investigates the use of ANNs to model human behaviour in design by comparing the predictive capability of ANNs and engineering students. Function structure models of 15 products are used as input for prediction. The type of information provided varied between topology and vocabulary. Analysis of prediction accuracy showed that ANNs perform comparably to students. However, students are more precise with their predictions. Finally, limitations and future work are discussed, with research questions presented for subsequent research.

Engineering projects involve the progressive development of preliminary information until a final design is reached. Appreciating its status may help make better decisions about task sequencing and may reduce unnecessary iteration. We present an approach to 1) elicit this maturity, 2) aggregate several of its facets per subsystem and generate insights for task prioritisation, and 3) overlaying this information in Augmented Reality onto a physical prototype. The progress is discussed and it is proposed that the approach can aid understanding, communication and management of design progress.

This work studies the perception of the impacts of AI and human process managers during a complex design task. Although performance and perceptions by teams that are AI- versus human-managed are similar, we show that how team members discern the identity of their process manager (human/AI), impacts their perceptions. They discern the interventions as significantly more helpful and manager sensitive to the needs of the team, if they believe to be managed by a human. Further results provide deeper insights into automating real-time process management and the efficacy of AI to fill that role.

Government regulation shapes many aspects of the design of a product. This paper addresses the effect of the complexity of a regulation on product architecture through the structure of the regulation itself. The structure of a regulation derives from dependencies among requirements and parameters in the regulation that are ipso facto design elements. Since design elements such as requirements and parameters have no formal definition in regulation, it is difficult to identify them accurately and consistently. We apply two approaches to defining and coding requirements and parameters in the context of washing machine regulation. The two coding approaches generate networks of design elements that are analyzed to measure the complexity of the regulation and by extension the product. We find significant differences in the complexity of the regulation when coded in different ways and note deficiencies and strengths of each approach. These findings will support future research to measure the impact of regulatory complexity on product architecture.

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.

Today, information and knowledge as competitive factors influence the success of companies as much as traditional production factors like human resources or physical capital. However, the reuse of design knowledge still represents a major challenge for engineering organizations. That is, because barriers exist hindering a successful knowledge reuse. On the basis of a literature review, the research depicted in this paper analyses the relation between single information conveying design knowledge and barriers hindering a successful knowledge reuse. Developing a model-based approach, we propose a micro logic containing three steps and underlying methods enabling practitioners to identify situation-specific barriers within their organization. We illustrate the industrial application of the approach in a case study at a mining machinery OEM.

Stakeholder perspective taking is a critical skill in early-stage problem exploration and framing. We examined stakeholder perspective taking within an early-stage design team of engineers at NASA to begin to understand in what ways and under what conditions designers adopt stakeholder perspectives in the context of professional engineering organizations. Our findings identify a spectrum of perspective taking during problem framing deliberations that ranges from (1) fully taking the stakeholder's point of view (POV), (2) interpreting the stakeholder's POV using the designer's POV, (3) implanting the stakeholder's POV into the designer's POV, to (4) fully taking the designer's own POV. We also identify and describe conditions that appeared to encourage or hinder perspective taking in this setting. These findings are significant because they suggest ways to gauge and encourage the skill of stakeholder perspective taking among professional engineers working on real-world design challenges with societal implications.

When observing a design space expansion during teamwork, several studies found that cumulative solution-related issues' occurrence follows a linear trend. Such findings contradict the hypothesis of solution-related issues being characteristic for the later design stages. This work relies on agent-based simulations to explore the emerging patterns in design solution space expansion during teamwork. The results demonstrate trends that accord with the empirical findings, suggesting that a cognitive effort in solution space expansion remains constant throughout a design session. The collected data on agents' cognitive processes and solution space properties enabled additional insights, which led to the detection of four distinct regimes of design solution space expansion.

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.