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The Circular Economy Action Plan is the main building block of the European Green Deal, Europe's new agenda for sustainable growth. Businesses need new technologies, new methods and new industrial organization either to create new businesses or to transform their products, processes and business models. They also need new talents to innovate, create businesses and new jobs, and transform society into a more sustainable one. Circular economy has grown significantly in recent years as a topic taught in engineering curricula. The purpose of this paper is to present the design, implementation and evaluation of a summer school program dedicated to the development, transformation and implementation of circular economy systems and new business models in manufacturing. The program was designed in collaboration with three university partners during a European project and relied on contributions from industrial companies, including start-ups and innovative companies. At the end, some lessons are drawn in order to show the main added value based on the evaluation of this summer school and to identify recommendations for the design and implementation of similar summer schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning factories that focus solely on education may benefit from replicating software systems that drive processes, activities, and workflows in industrial environments. However, such systems (e.g., PLM, ERP or MES) will not meet the requirements if the learning factory intends to be an environment where education and research merge. The flexibility, volatility, ambiguity and incertitudes that characterise the integrated learning-research environment need to be addressed with an approach that replicates industrial reality, but that also accommodates and stimulates the versatility of the learning factory. This paper depicts how the digital twinning approach integrates the physical units of a learning factory and the software systems, but also data acquisition, simulation, and educational/didactic approaches to production/assembly processes and production optimalisation. The approach thus also includes, for example, IoT, planning, monitoring, diagnosis and (quality) control. In addition, the digital twinning approach is used to combine the current state of the learning factory and its activities with designed (to-be) and potential (could-be) representations of the environment in order to stimulate the evolution/improvement of both research and education and their combination. For this purpose, digital twinning is combined with the concept of daydreaming. The paper illustrates the approach based on an ongoing development trajectory of a new learning factory, in setting it up as an environment for education and simultaneously as a testbed for research. It discusses how the development process relies on the digital twinning approach and how, when the learning factory is commissioned, this digital twinning approach will increasingly integrate the use of and activities in the learning factory into the development/evolution cycle of that learning factory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital transformation of manufacturing companies is a huge driver of complexity in organizational structures and processes. Challenges such as an increasing number of variants, rapid changes in technology, and a multitude of interfaces between IT systems within companies require changed qualifications in the workforce. Employees lack a profound understanding of the added value that digitalization can bring to the company and themselves. To address these challenges, simulation games are a suitable approach. Simulation games are active learning methods that simulate real systems in an artificial environment. The goal is to give employees the opportunity to gain experience and make decisions without creating a pressure situation or endangering the real production system. This enables them to better understand, evaluate and design real systems. In order to make optimal use of simulation games in manufacturing companies, they should be customized to the company and its employees due to individual processes and structures. This paper presents a procedure model for designing a concept of individualized simulation games for manufacturing companies in the context of digitalization. It starts with the identification of requirements. Subsequently, the requirements of the individual elements are combined into a holistic simulation game. The piloting of the framework is presented using an example from industrial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manufacturing industry involves innumerable complex tasks that require significant knowledge and experience to execute. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, particularly with the emergence of powerful large language models such as ChatGPT, new opportunities have risen to provide knowledge through conversation. With its seemingly endless knowledge base and highly organized response style, ChatGPT is expected to revolutionize every aspect of the industry. However, the extent of ChatGPT's capabilities and how they could contribute to the industry's future revolution remains unclear. In light of this, this paper performed a systematic testing of ChatGPT to uncover its advantages and limitations. Based on the testing results, the authors provided some prospects and critical research questions of ChatGPT from a manufacturing perspective. Furthermore, the authors recommended a technology development roadmap to successfully integrate ChatGPT into the manufacturing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the importance of moving towards sustainability rises up in public, the presence of strategies to achieve it, in engineering academic frameworks, hardly increase. In particular, tackling environmental, social and technical aspects in conjunct ways remain difficult to teach in engineering education. The goal of this paper is to offer new engineering pedagogical strategies in order to address sustainable issues with a more global and integrated vision. An experiment of a pedagogical situation anchored into society will be presented and analysed thanks to sustainable skills defined by different institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A fundamental change in how businesses are conducted and operated is an essential factor to reach more sustainable solutions on the industry level. However, the education of graduate students in Product Service Systems (PSS) or specifically in sustainable PSS is still very limited. Despite the fact that there has been significant work on how PSS performs as a business concept and how it may contribute to competitiveness, the sustainability-orientated PSS research has paid limited attention to the education sector. Therefore, this paper presents a concept on how sustainable PSS can be taught to production management students using a business game. The presented concept is based on a business game currently used in production technology education at the University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the recent “Ecam Engineering” five-year international program developed at Ecam Lyon in France, a “Design” specialization area is proposed to educate engineers to the issues of systemic design. This program has emerged from the collaboration of Ecam Lyon with Politecnico di Torino, Italy. By offering different courses from the two institutions to the students, this program attempts to broaden the scope of classical engineering curricula towards a large spectrum of “design” issues. However, there is a huge gap between the content and pedagogy of systemic design developed at Politecnico to address an audience of future industrial designers, and the classical engineering design curriculum based on methodological and systematized approaches. This paper discusses the conceptual and operational challenges faced in this program to manage efficiently the transition of the engineers’ curriculum towards sustainable design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design broadly defined deals with mapping from societal wants or needs to means for satisfying these needs. Axiomatic design is a well-known approach to design that was initially proposed by Nam P. Suh in the late 1970s. Since that time, it has underpinned much academic research in engineering design; it has been taught internationally as part of engineering curricula; and it has been used across many industries. This paper presents a summary of axiomatic design and provides practical suggestions for best practices in implementation and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suh's Axiomatic Design (AD) methodology has been employed to solve technical problems in a variety of disciplines. One area of interest is the use of this methodology in creative fields such as interactive art. In this paper, the authors propose and implement the use of AD in this manner. We call this approach “Creative AD”. Creative AD was deployed in visual art project courses at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in collaboration with Reykjavik University's Science and Engineering Department to develop “Interactive electro-mechanical art”. The first iteration of innovative and multi-disciplinary works were selected to be displayed at Hreindýraland Festival 2011 in Egilsstaðir, Iceland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity is considered to be an important ability for an engineer to have, and it is therefore important that the development of this ability is structured into the education of engineering students, along with the ability to apply, analyse and evaluate based on existent knowledge. In this paper, the importance of abduction in creative engineering processes is briefly reviewed. It has been shown that abductive reasoning plays a key role in design as it is the only logical operation that introduces new ideas. Its encouragement within the KTH Royal Institute of Technology's degree projects at the Department of Aeronautical and Vehicle Engineering is analysed by examining the stated intended learning outcomes, and through interviewing students. It is found that abductive reasoning is not explicitly encouraged within the intended learning outcomes of these degree project courses, despite its importance in creative thinking. Although, it is very likely that at least some abduction takes place in the project work, its absence from the intended learning outcomes means that students may not have a felt need to demonstrate their abductive reasoning, and supervisors may encourage only non-creative deductive or inductive reasoning. A more explicit inclusion of abductive reasoning in the intended learning outcomes would help both students and supervisors to include creative thinking in the degree project courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change and global warming are having negative consequences for humans and nature. Manufacturing companies are particularly affected by the consequences of climate change. For example, extreme weather events can cause to production failure or even the collapse of entire supply chains. An adaptation to the impacts of climate change and the implementation of preventive measures requires an awareness and comprehensive knowledge in this topic. In the education of engineers in the field of factory planning and factory operation, the aspects of climate change and its consequences are not or only marginally considered. A systematic involvement in engineering education is shown in the paper. Through the use of innovative teaching methods of problem-based learning, awareness is created in order to effectively prepare manufacturing companies for the consequences of climate change in addition to the pure knowledge transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TRIZ methodology was popularized in the Czech Republic in technical journals since 1980. Then it has been lectured at several technical universities since 1996 (Brno, Prague, Liberec, Pilsen, Ostrava, Zilina, Kosice). Since 2000 original publications from more Russian authors have been translated into Czech, and later some of their publications from English. Into companies TRIZ enters in the form of motivational three hour lectures and subsequent short-term 2+1 day courses during last ten years. Anyway, to follow-up the educational course of TRIZ by practical applications in intention of repeated analyze and solving a concrete innovation task go well in companies only in combination of several factors. Despite to the many positive references of more than 2260 listeners, mostly from companies and partially from technical universities, TRIZ methodology has not yet become a common studied theme neither in universities nor in corporate development departments. In this paper the authors summarize the experience of teaching and implementation TRIZ at technical universities and findings from teaching and applications in companies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia for the last 35 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, numerous learning factories for education, training, and research have been built up in industry and academia. In recent years learning factory initiatives were elevated from a local to a European and then to a worldwide level. In 2014 the CIRP Collaborative Working Group (CWG) on Learning Factories enables a lively exchange on the topic “Learning Factories for future oriented research and education in manufacturing”. In this paper results of discussions inside the CWG are presented. First, what is meant by the term Learning Factory is outlined. Second, based on the definition a description model (morphology) for learning factories is presented. The morphology covers the most relevant characteristics and features of learning factories in seven dimensions. Third, following the morphology the actual variance of learning factory manifestations is shown in six learning factory application scenarios from industrial training over education to research. Finally, future prospects of the learning factory concept are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptual models are models that support understanding and reasoning about problem and solution space by abstracting in many directions. Experienced lead designers and architects collect a rich set of such models including figures of merit over time. In many cases, the conceptual modeling is a tacit competence. We have transformed this way of working in the area of designing semiconductor equipment into an educational module. In several workshops, we have seen the application of similar modeling in other domains. The essence is that conceptual models are made at multiple levels, e.g. for elementary components, their functionality and properties, aggregated modules or subsystems, the entire system, the system in its operational context, and the impact on the customer's business. At every level, multiple views are needed to understand and reason. Typical views include physical models, functional or dynamic behavior models, and performance models in mathematical and quantitative form. This paper describes how we teach conceptual modeling to master students and how the chosen format and case helps in achieving the learning outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The range and intention of Product-Service System (PSS) design are quite different from the traditional product-oriented design. Therefore, designers and design organizations in the future must have new capabilities and competencies to realize an effective PSS design. In this study, the authors develop an educational business game for accustoming users to the philosophy of PSS and changing their mindset. Business games have the advantage of effective and enjoyable learning through strategic thinking in a simulated business environment. This paper presents the latest structure of the developed game and types of strategic thinking of players in the game. The effectiveness of this game is demonstrated by the application in several workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]