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It is recognized that design for excellence (DfX) methods could deliver significant performance improvements in industrialized construction (IC) projects. However, DfX methods in IC projects in Chi...

Purpose This paper aims to examine the perceptions of good design attributes and propose a model to estimate their relative importance through fundamental drivers. Design activities must understand and meet customer and producer expectations and deliver products in a profitable manner. Requirements analysis is conducted to understand customer expectations, but in new product development, this information can be available too late in the development cycle. Moreover, customer needs are often unclear to designers at early stages of design, with customers often unable to articulate their requirements or unaware of how a new product may solve problems or create complications. Evaluating non-product-specific drivers to generalized good product design attributes can help designers estimate important factors in early requirements analysis. Design/methodology/approach Quantification of the weight designers place in their mental models of what makes up a good product is determined from linear regression modeling, providing a more concrete evaluation of inherently subjective perceptions. A survey is deployed using Mechanical TurkTM to collect perceptions of good product attributes and drivers through product case studies. Data are analyzed using a utility theory framework and importance of attributes is estimated from the importance of drivers. Findings A generalized model that estimates good design attributes from drivers is presented. This study also demonstrates that non-product-specific attribute importance can be extracted from specific product cases. An application example demonstrating the relative importance of good design attributes is given for different types of watches. Research limitations/implications The approach is intended to supplement ordinary product design and development processes, and is not intended to replace market research and concept testing activities. Model coefficient weights are dependent on the quality of the data that was collected, which has limitations. While the current study included confounding variables, introducing interactions into the model could make attribute importance prediction more accurate. Practical implications While design requirements analysis is now central to modern design practice, these estimates can be available too late in the development cycle, especially when customers have no experience with the product type. The developed model quantifies design attributes that consumers, manufacturers and society as a whole use to distinguish if a product will be considered well designed. Product designers can better focus their development resources toward good design attributes based on guidance generated from generalized drivers. Originality/value Historically, requirements analysis is undertaken specific to the product being designed. This paper provides a model to give designers early guidance in a non-product-specific framework. The framework also considers good design attributes as holistic, including societal and producer concerns. Although all of the proposed good design attributes can be associated with a well-engineered product, it is unnecessary to design a product that performs exceptionally on every attribute. This model provides identification of the handful of attributes that can make the most significant difference for design success.

Integrated Design Engineering (IDE) is the further development and extension of the Magdeburg model of Integrated Product Development [Burc-2001, Sect. 1.5]. It also contains elements of dynamic product development [Otto-1996, Sect. 1.4], user-centred design [e.g. ISO 9241-210], sustainable product development [e.g. Rutt-2012, Chaps. 5 and 12], Design for X [BoDe-2003, Meer-1994] (Sect. 14.1.1) and work and organizational psychology [Aamo-2015]. IDE is human-centred, because the human being with his abilities, possibilities and qualifications is in the centre of all considerations within IDE with all his activities concerning planning, development, production, use, maintenance and re-circulation of products (and the possible impairments linked to these activities).

Green modular product design is a very crucial technique for sustainable manufacturing. By making good choices of combinations of the available components and modules of a design, it is possible to build sustainability into the life cycle of a product. For effective modular design, it is critical to know the design factors and their potential impact on the ultimate economic, environmental, and the social performance of the product or process. Nevertheless, in a fuzzy environment, one or more factors are not precisely known at the design stage. First, we propose a set of multiple criteria for evaluating a modular product design. Second, a fuzzy grouping genetic algorithm (FGGA) is proposed for grouping components of a design in a modular fashion. The proposed modular product design approach is promising, especially when the design factors and the criteria for sustainability evaluation are not precisely known at the design stage.

The ability for a product or a service to meet customer needs and requirements efficiently before its market launch is a key-point in design and development activities. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) represents one of the most powerful design methods to achieve such a goal.This study investigates the QFD-based methods proposed in the last two decades, whose use in different ambits of Design for X (DfX) is reported to be effective.We selected most common QFD based methods, analysing how designers can implement and coordinate them in design activities effectively throughout their application to an identical case study.

Though life cycle assessment can provide the analytic basis of environmental impact of products for engineering designers, it requires not only a significant amount of time but also a detailed bill of materials of the products to determine the optimal product designs. To overcome the barrier between life cycle assessment and design, in this paper, the optimal product design for life cycle assessment is studied. Instead of comparing a few design alternatives due to the barrier, design variables are allowed to vary as an optimization problem to minimize environmental impact. As a numerical example, the design of universal electric motors was demonstrated. Under the five different design cases, the optimal designs could be achieved to minimize the total environmental impact of universal motors.

International audience; a promising technology and opened up newprospects for the product development. Nevertheless, designmethods remain predominantly based on conventional manufacturingprocesses and AM capabilities need to be bettermastered and integrated in the design team. This article questionshow a new technology (i.e. AM) can enable productinnovation. Thus to support designers in preliminary design,a methodology is introduced. The specificity of this methodologyis the use of a tailoredAMknowledge, i.e. a knowledgedelivered to the right user at the right time and in the rightformat, in order to be useful and usable during the creativestages of the design process

– This paper presents initial results from a series of modules introducing Design for X (DfX) concepts to student project teams. DfX methods are recognised as a means to facilitate decision making throughout the design process and directly support the “Design” graduate attribute as defined by the Canandian Enginering Accreditation Board. In this senior design course, third and fourth year students are integrated into the same project teams, with the aim of promoting peer learning and leadership. Therefore, a flipped classroom approach was applied to the modules, followed by team-based reflection and discussion after which the appropriate DfX methods were to be applied within the projects. In the second semester third year students from each team were required to update the class on how these methods had been implemented in their projects. Preliminary results show active participation by the fourth year students, with varying levels of application of the tools within the projects. This paper will present specific examples of student led discussion and exercises surrounding DfX topics, as well as a qualitative evaluation of the application of DfX methods by the student teams. Recommendations for future improvement include the development of additional short duration, concrete, formative DfX activities for inclusion in the modules.

A common strategy of producers to cope with increasing competition is to involve users in their business processes. User integration happens, among other reasons, because producers seek knowledge about product usage. In order to access this knowledge, a plethora of approaches and methods can be applied. Many of these are discussed in different but related domains, such as Open Innovation and Design Thinking. The goal of this paper is to start an investigation of these different approaches and structure them according to a single context. This single context is provided by a model describing the sharing of knowledge between user and producer. In this paper, the sharing is based on the mutual exchange information. Knowledge sharing is facilitated by two strategies: user integration and producer integration. Paradigms such as mass production, mass customization and servitization are put into the context of the model. Within the discussion, more specific approaches like Social Media exploitation, Product Embedded Information Devices, Design for X, product takeback and product services are structured according to the proposed model and the two strategies. The conclusion of this paper names open questions, such as the role of information quality and rewarding users for sharing their information with producers.

This paper proposes a concept design method, called Sacrifice for X (SfX), which is supposed to be applied in early development situations. In principle, this method is an alternative to brainstorming, but aims for better characteristics in terms of effort for learning the method (i.e., fewer behavioral rules), scaling to multiple teams, team member solution adherence, and tangibility of opportunistic design choices. Considering engineering as finding the right solution in a design space, then SfX is figuratively mapping out the area where the assumed solution lies. Mapping it one aspect at a time, or one aspect per team. If one thinks of Design for X (DfX) as concurrently integrating different aspects into a design, then SfX can be considered as its counterpart where all but one aspect can be excluded. Everything, especially design constraints, can be sacrificed for one aspect X, hence the name “Sacrifice for”. Knowledge, guidelines and toolboxes from DfX are reusable, which makes SfX a good companion method for teams exercising DfX: SfX for design space explorations and DfX for solution realization. Furthermore, the applicability, benefits and caveats of the presented method are discussed.

Design-for-Assembly (DfA) and Conceptual DfA criteria are used in the generation of cost-effective assembly sequences for complex products. The design freedom suggests optimal solutions in the assembly time minimization problem regardless costs and issues about materials and manufacturing processes selection. The goal of this approach is to investigate how the application of the conceptual DfA affects the material and manufacturing costs (Design-to-Cost). A complex product (tool-holder carousel of a CNC machine) is used as a case study. The outcome is an approach to support designers and engineers in the re-design process for the product development and cost reduction.

Although all aspects of a product design are demanding and need several resources to be completed, Design for X (DfX) represents a series of formal methodologies used to optimize a specific aspect of the product design under consideration. Those DfX tools deal with different stages of the product design and there is considerable gap concerning the package design cycle. The proposed methodology Design for Skin and Shape (DfS&S) is focused on the package design industry and offers significant advantage towards its success. It helps the designers to be focused on shapes that are easily recognized by the customers and then create appropriate graphics for them. Following this approach, it is easier to create an innovative optical identity for the product and its packaging during the conceptual stage. The methodology can reduce the development time of the package, while designers have in mind, from the beginning of the design process, the shape which will guide them to its completion. Following the proposed methodology different packaging designs are presented.

Concept design plays a central role in project success as its product effectively locks the majority of system life cycle cost. Such extraordinary leverage presents a business case for conducting concept design in a credible fashion, particularly for first-of-a-kind systems that advance the state of the art and that have high design uncertainty. A key challenge, however, is to know when credible design convergence has been achieved in such systems. Using a space system example, this paper characterizes the level of convergence needed for concept design in the context of technical and programmatic resource margins available in preliminary design and highlights the importance of design and cost evaluation learning curves in determining credible convergence. It also provides techniques for selecting trade study cases that promote objective concept evaluation, help reveal unknowns, and expedite convergence within the trade space and conveys general practices for conducting effective concept design-to-cost studies.

Achieving competitive advantages in product development may lead to significant efforts to identify and minimize product design and development cycles time and cost while improving product quality.

The main focus of this paper is how the concept design phase of the product development process can be improved by using an objective data-driven approach in selecting a final concept design to progress further. A quantitative new test-bed ‘Product Optimisation Value Engineering’ (PROVEN) is presented to critically assess new and evolving powertrain technologies at the concept design phase. The new test-bed has the ability to define a technology value map to assess multiple technical options as a function of its attributes, whose precise values can be determined at a given cost. A mathematical model that incorporates a highly adaptable, data-driven and multi-attribute value approach to product specification and conceptual design is developed, novel to the concept design process. This creates a substantially optimised product offering to the market, reducing overall development costs while achieving customer satisfaction.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore that cost reduction in product system are not supporting the development of innovation. This contradiction becomes a great challenge for any type of industry, to improve the competitive level. In this research, the focuses on the mechanism of cost reduction using Design to Cost (DTC) strategy in achieving cost improvement and innovation. The contradiction is solved using Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) that is integrated into Design To Cost Innovation framework. There are two type of cases introduce in this research that highlight the application and the outcome of TRIZ in Design to Cost framework. From the case studies, the results show that the magnitude of cost improvement and innovation achieved is more than the application of conventional tools in Design to Cost strategy. These change the limitation of mindset in cost reduction without compromise or trade-off, and open up new possibility of research for cost reduction in processes and services for various.

Sustainable manufacturing is creation of manufactured products through economically-sound processes that minimize negative environmental impacts while conserving energy and natural resources. Sustainable manufacturing also enhances employee, community, and product safety. In order to adapt sustainable Manufacturing concepts, it is essential to plan and decide from a product design and development stage as it has been revealed that 80% of sustainability impacts from the product are decided in the product design and development stage. In modern day Products Design and manufacturing it is always advantages to have complete knowledge of the Life Cycle of the Product. If Life cycle information is available for the designers, it will be easy for them to take many decisions related to specially the environmental performance or eco efficiency which is one of the emerging marketing tools. Further, with the full knowledge of the product life cycle, new/existing products can be designed/redesigned based on eco-design principals or environmentally friendly manner, thereby to improve the material and energy efficiency during the manufacturing and user phases and finally will have better environmental performances. The product life cycle and Eco design are two key techniques used in Sustainable Manufacturing specially these will enable to convert any existing product or process to be competitive in the market by better environmental performances and quality while minimizing manufacturing cost beside with better environmental performances. These issues prevail mainly since there is no such systematic approach towards Product Design and Development among the many manufacturers. Since Sustainable Manufacturing Concept applicable for all major phases of the product Life cycle, it is essential to co-relate life cycle assessment outcomes with product design and development process. However, there are numerous decisions needed to take into account at different stages of product design and development process. Therefore, in this research, a decision support model is developed based on LCA and Eco Design concepts. The developed model has been validated with few existing product decision and development processes. The results shows that significant number of issues and potential improvements to the existing design and development processes can be taken from the proposed model and that will leads to many sustainability options to the whole product life cycle than what is persist presently.

In order to improve product development, enterprises need to strengthen product lifecycle management (PLM) and collaborative design capability. For the description of product design we have proposed a four-level structural classification scheme, which includes Design Intentions, Design Requirements, Design Parameters and TRIZ Engineering Parameters. This study is based on the classification scheme, and introduces the concept of Design for X (DFX) and then discusses the design principles from four different perspectives including manufacturing aspect, customer aspect, maintenance aspect and environmental aspect. We deliberate the meaning of these aspects and further establish their relevance with the TRIZ 48 engineering parameters. An electric scooter design is presented to illustrate the application.

Over the decades, manufacturing firms have tried to Design for Manufacturability merely by exhorting industrial design engineers to create more producible-designs. This is most often achieved by considering the available manufacturing system capability for the product development, and it is common to run into troubles in many cases due to barriers to integrate product definition and manufacturing operations. In this paper, authors aim to explore how production innovations (as new manufacturing capabilities) can contribute to an increased industrial design space for product design engineers, enabling more design freedom while still obtaining producibility through removing and/or loosening constraints over product designs. The findings of a series of industrial case studies presented in this paper show promising outcomes on how production innovations can influence positively the expansion of the solution space of industrial design engineers. In addition, manufacturing engineers are driven to explore new materials, new manufacturing processes and new manufacturing (working) methods to support product innovation.

This new product development research reviews the “design for” or DFX literature to consolidate the current body of knowledge and to seek the future direction of the field. It finds that DFX techniques can be placed under the heading of sustainability in the dimensions of economics (dominated by supply chain design techniques), ecology (dominated by environmental design techniques) and social equity. A DFS (design for sustainability) taxonomy is presented to order and consolidate current techniques within these categories. A new DFX concept is developed that incorporates remanufacture, reuse, and recycling as one environmentally-friendly approach for end-of-life. A strategy and life-cycle phase framework is developed to enhance the application of DFX techniques by practitioners and to enable DFX strategy research. The current literature is deficient in addressing social equity and reverse logistics, and these areas should be further developed. Several other future research directions, including the need for aligning with theory and empirical testing, as well as exploring the relationships between the DFX techniques and dimensions of sustainability, are presented.

Design for X (DfX) is a methodology for the definition and implementation of a range of goals which allow the development of an optimal product based on a series of aspects i.e. manufacturing, assembly, reliability, usability, ergonomics. A great amount of research work has been implemented towards improving a product that is designed using different aspects of the design process as a criterion for optimization. The proposed Design for Skin & Shape methodology (DfS&S) is focusing towards the design of creative products and packages, based on a shape and graphic texture that clarifies directly in the customer mind what is the product on the selves. At the same time, it creates a clear optical identity to its mind for the product which is directly associated with the design. An additional advantage of the DfS&S is that it can reduce the product development time since the concept is defined from the beginning of the design cycle. A number of case studies are presented.

In today’s highly demanding customers and aggressive competitors, product development is getting more complex and needs to innovate continuously. On the other hand common direction towards cost savings and shortening of design cycle forces to make the product design process highly efficient at high level of performance. Accordingly, this paper provides a new creative design tool to support robust product development by taking advantage of a creativity-based design process to achieve the goals of innovative product design. It describes a pilot prototype of software system used for computer-aided product development which has been developed based on the characteristics of the product design process, integrating the creative thinking methods, information technologies and computer application technologies (CAD system, LabVIEW, Game Technology, etc.). This new design environment leads to a flexible working flow of designing a product hand in hand with searching a product library that is arranged by geometric properties and allows designers, engineers and other professionals to collaborate with each other on the same platform in the product development process.

The design of a product involves a process in which several different aspects are combined in order to obtain a final, suitable and optimum product. Designers must interact with different stakeholder groups, make decisions and complete the design process. In order to achieve this, different evaluation techniques are used. Depending on the chosen technique and on the field and environment in which each member of the design team was trained, each one of the members will consider one or several aspects of the design project but from a point of view or perspective in line with his/her particular professional background. As a result, all decisions which will affect the design process of the product are focused on these aspects and individual viewpoints. In this paper, an evaluation technique is proposed which allows one to take suitable decisions, taking into account all the factors and perspectives which affect the design process in the best way, searching for a balance among them in relation to the aims and interests of a specific design project. The development of this evaluation technique was inspired by the way in which neurons interact with one another in the brain and it has been based on the Hebbian learning rule for neural networks. Lastly, a real application of the proposed technique is presented to demonstrate its applicability in evaluating industrial designs.

In low-carbon product design, product environment, as well as economic and manufacturing capabilities, should be considered simultaneously. The purpose of this paper is to improve the product carbon footprint calculation efficiency. This study not only considers cost, supplier manufacturing capacity, and transport modes of product components from the viewpoint of low-carbon product design, but it also provides information on product GHG values, design phase cost, as well as the product decisions made by enterprises. In this way, enterprise objectives about carbon footprints and product cost can be met. Based on the product life cycle and product category specifications, this study, following the actual industry process flow, collects and calculates data on GHG emissions of components within the product life cycle, cost and supplier production capacity. The aim is to determine the operational parameters and constraint equations. Multi-objective planning is used to establish a low carbon optimal evaluation model. By reviewing carbon emissions in each phase, the study further determines whether or not to modify product structure and consumption in order to improve the efficiency of product carbon footprint calculation, reduce R&D cost, and help enterprises design low-carbon products. Finally, the findings are used for a case analysis.

The design and the manufacturing configuration are important for the supply chain to ship the successful new product to market. In order to improve the manufacturing configuration to achieve the higher quality, lower cost and on time delivery before design readiness, the structured approach is presented in this research from the perspective of the SCM. The DFX with CE and the One-time-pass-rate with VSM are implemented to improve the manufacturing configuration. The key statistical techniques including FMEA and SPC are utilized. The case study on company of power meter demonstrates that the structured approach can help to improve 28% of the performance on manufacturing configuration before design readiness.

All product lifecycle processes are highly determined by product design. The concept of Lean Design focuses on maximizing customer value and minimizing waste throughout all stages of product lifecycle by an optimized product design. Design for X approaches are essential elements of Lean Design to make the right design decisions by help of concrete qualitative design guidelines. However, Design for X approaches focus on a specific stage of product lifecycle or specific aspect of products or processes, what makes a holistic optimization of product design highly complex. Therefore, the paper analyses the vast range of qualitative design guidelines given in Design for X approaches concerning their effects on product lifecycle and derives recommendations for a lifecycle optimized product design.

This paper describes the early findings of a research project to investigate the development of design processes to achieve reduced Whole Life Cost (WLC) within the aerospace industry, with a main focus on civil large engines (CLE). An investigation has been performed into the means of influencing the design decision processes through the analysis and in-depth understanding of the key in-service cost drivers. A three-level approach has been proposed to improve and, in some cases, to ensure information flow to enable best possible decisions on the early system design stage. A mapping of the in-service cost drivers has been made to each level of approach to raise the awareness, to educate and finally, to directly influence system design engineers decisions.

Due to rising energy prices and stricter regulations of carbon dioxide emissions, it is not sufficient to optimize energy consumption only during the utilization of products; production has to become more energy efficient, too. In order to reduce the energy demand, energy concerning aspects must be considered early in the development process of the production plants. In these phases, attributes that are responsible for the later energy consumption are predetermined. But the energy demand is often not in focus of the development process. For that reason a methodology for the development of energy efficient production plants is currently being developed by the authors.

The lifecycle of a product and the lifecycle of the respective production equipment intersect in the production phase of the product, which at the same time represents the use phase of the production equipment. Product development and production development however follow more or less independent pathways, making use of different terminology, methods and tools. Problems tend to occur especially on issues requiring deeper domain-spanning integration. This leads to the questions, if and how both process streams could or should be interlinked any deeper or mutually adapted any further, and if an integrated methodology would be reachable and desirable. The presented research work proposes answers to these questions based on a comparison of both domains’ processes, methods and tool/IT perspectives.

With the development of the economic society, people gradually begin to pay more attention to the pursuit of product design compared to the product appearance and function. Thus, the present interactive design gets more and more attention in the product design. Choosing the daily product as the carrier, this paper mainly concludes and summarizes the interactive manner of the modern product design from the three aspects of the peoples feeling, behavior and affection in order to implement the interaction design methods research in the product design.

This paper examines how best to determine the contextual and dynamic attributes of an affordable system. The complexity of the problem cannot be overstated. The affordability trade space is composed of a relational set of attributes that are contextually sensitive; once this set is bounded, the need arises for an implicit comparison to other systems, sub-systems and components. The problem may be embedded in how systems are designed, how they are governed, and how they are evolved. Considerations are provided to help resolve the complexities involved in identifying and evaluating what an affordable system is. Most of the existing literature is focused on cost comparison or performance comparison of systems separately; the literature which addresses a perspective of how cost and capability of systems can be integrated is found under the disciplines of Cost as an Independent Variable (CAIV) and Value Engineering (VE), but appears insufficient in providing an encompassing framework in which to develop a design for affordability trade space. Both of these disciplines may not adequately address the life cycle or temporal dimensions of systems. To address this deficiency, INCOSE and National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) have worked to define affordability, and identify related concerns, through ongoing working groups since late 2009. Both organizations have developed definitions for use in this context. Even though affordability has been defined by NDIA, INCOSE and Military Operations Research Society (MORS), in discussions at the recent MORS Special Meeting on Affordability Analysis – How do we do it? (Oct.2012), the Development Planning Working Group discovered that affordability analysis was contextually-sensitive, often leading to misunderstanding and fragmented perspectives. Various industry working groups have recommended developing and formalizing affordability analysis processes, including recognizing the difference between cost and affordability analyses… Key insights include the need to consistently define an affordability context, and establish a framework for the appropriate analytic process. They also have determined that accountability for affordability needs to be assigned across the life cycle. System Engineers must understand that the affordability trade space is fluid, an ever changing set of boundaries that evolve as mission needs evolve, and recognize that any affordable solution is essentially a “snapshot” within that trade space at any point in the life of the system.

Modern industrial design has been extended to the whole product life cycle of production, manufacture, sale and recycling from traditional appearance design and product performance. Facing today’s intense and diversification market competition, product design must be taken the whole product life cycle routes based on design, quality, economic and environmental protection. Starting from the design, designer should concern about the product life cycle of the product in each stage of the design process, and use design principles and methods for product design reasonable. With quality competitive as the basis for product, with economic environmental competition as improve quality of power, industrial design can provide high quality product and create a perfect user experience, in order to reduce pollution and satisfied our clients’ needs. In this paper, industrial design processes and methods for product life cycle are discussed and analyzed systematic, so as to product designers of the designer to provide methodology.

Cost estimation is a critical issue for many companies concerning both offers generation and company strategic evaluations. In this paper, a framework for early cost estimation has been proposed to some firms for an assessment of its main features. The aim of the industrial survey is to promote a discussion on the needs and the expectations regarding cost estimation in order to obtain feedbacks to be addresses in the implementation of a software tool. Gather data has led to a ranking of the main characteristics the tool should have.

International audience; Sustainable manufacturing is a rising issue. Ensuring both consumer satisfaction and minimal environmental impact is very challenging. In that whole process, it is customary to say that the design stage determines 80 % of the future environmental impact. One way to contain this impact at an acceptable level is to manage the products' end-of-life from the design activities. This chapter points out product reuse strategies—i.e. direct reuse and remanufacturing—aiming at conserving the added-value of used products as much as possible into new products. The first contribution attempts to provide a state-of-the-art of design for these high added-value end-of-life strategies. Direct reuse and remanufacturing are thus analysed and the principal design guidelines are furthermore given, classified according to three dimensions: product, process and business model. This chapter then contributes to enlarging the spectrum of reuse strategies, presenting an innovative end-of-life strategy: repurposing. It consists of reusing products in other applications after transformations. The main challenges of such a strategy will be discussed.

Flexibility in product Design has been defined as the ?Ability to change or adapt with economy of time, effort, cost or performance.? Hence Flexibility ensures the greater economy, adaptability and evolution of the product.The form and aesthetics of a product is its unquestionable determinant of success in the market. In today?s market, companies have to keep up with fast changing technologies, fashion trends, economy and user needs. This paper presents a review on the role of flexible design in finalising the form of a product, for achieving economy by design. The research work includes studying the form of few successful smartphones and cars and; from their understanding, deriving how forms played the role in success of the product in the market while the product and its iterations themselves follow flexible design.

The industrial world is today navigating from a traditional product-based business to a new more complex solution-based orientation, pushed by new technologies, a multiple functionalities demand and a change in the customer value perception. Several are the methods and tools proposed in literature to aid manufacturers to design those solutions in an integrated and systematized way but none of them is really able to consider together product and service components, according to both company and customer views. In this context, a methodology generating new Design for X (DfX) guidelines to support the early integration of service features already in the product design of PSS has been proposed by the authors. This methodology can raise engineers’ consciousness in designing PSSs in a systematic and integrated way and provides insights into the link between the design process of PSS and the design knowledge generation in terms of guidelines and rules. In particular, the objective of this paper is to test this methodology through an application case. The test, following a theory building procedure, contributes to obtain the final methodology design, providing a double result: industrial experts’ feedbacks, giving to the authors a major awareness of its strengths and weaknesses, and new industry-specific PSS design guidelines and rules.

Recent innovations have focused on the development of products which have embedded features such as sustainable energy power sources and intelligent controls which take into account energy efficiency and environmental variables that drive the total cost of the product ownership. The primary purpose of such efforts is to promote products that are more energy efficient and that are making smaller environmental footprint during their lifecycle. Lower cost, easy assembly and better manufacturability are some of the parameters that are part of the Design for Excellence (DfX) methodology. One of the most significant expenses that customers will face will occur during the use stage of the product lifecycle. This paper discusses the application of Design for Use (DfU) strategies on a conceptual design and prototype of a solar skimmer for a swimming pool. A group of senior students in mechanical engineering technology program completed this project as their requirement for graduation.

Generalization of electromechanical actuators use in thrust vector control launchers applications has increased electronics power level needs by a factor of ten, in a global context which puts costs under pressure. The need for a modular and affordable power solution being versatile to fulfil different launcher mission profiles has become thereby stronger. In order to target different power and functional needs, an attractive design should be modular and multipurpose, will work at higher voltages and will be able to deliver powers up to a dozen of kilowatts. Moreover, an efficient design to cost approach will consider alternative technologies, widely used by other high-reliability industries, including Components Off-The-Shelf (COTS) integration. This paper presents the design of a low cost and highly integrated smart power module (SPM) intended to be used into launchers applications, embedding technologies and components from automotive world and being mainly producible by large-scale industry.

This chapter defines a number of Cost Engineering challenges from industry and their potential best practice solutions as industry case studies and industry practices surveys completed during the previous 5 years. In particular Life Cycle Costing in the context of upgrade and revamp in the process industry and also an example of design for full life cycle target cost for the manufacturing industry. Life Cycle Costing of complex long life cycle facilities is exemplified by identification and development of a life cycle costing of oil refineries through a survey of 15 companies and full life cycle experts and a review of the literature. Life cycle costing practices and a standardised life cycle cost breakdown structure are identified. Design to full life cycle target cost practices have been identified in the development of a full life cycle cost estimating tool for marine radar systems. In particular a survey of 17 companies and a case study with a marine radar systems company has identified specific practices useful in developing products to full life cycle target cost. In planning for future Through Life Engineering Services it is proposed that the collection of cost data and the understanding of Cost Engineering practices is a potential competitive advantage.

In a competitive and globalized business environment, the need for the sustainable product development becomes stronger. To meet these trends, the total cost during the product life cycle, called life cycle cost (LCC), should be considered as an important factor in new product development. In this paper, a hybrid life cycle cost model (HLCCM) is developed as a hybrid life cycle cost system (HLCCS) to estimate the cost performance of product design alternatives. It aims at improving the cost performance of products using genetic algorithms and artificial neural networks which consist of high-level product attributes and LCC results. The framework incorporated HLCCM is proposed in cloud computing based collaborative design environment and allows users to estimate the product data and other related information on a wide variety of application. This paper presents approximate LCC estimation of product design alternatives represented by solid models in cloud computing based collaborative design environment.

Incremental improvement of conventional traction drive technologies, product architectures, process chains and production technologies are nearly pushed to their limits. The small efforts out of extensive optimization endeavors do not lead into essential customer value any more, as efficiency cannot be increased recognizably and cost reductions vanish amongst overall drivetrain-, battery- and vehicle costs. Therefore, the introduction of new or the qualification of currently unsuited production technologies to the process chain in order to optimize efficiency, enhance functionality of components and reduce costs is an approach for holistic improvement of electric drive production. This paper presents a technology and tooling concept that enables the insulation of long stators by injection molding. Furthermore, the technological maturity and the economic and technological potential of the innovative thin-walled injection molding process as well as product implications are evaluated. It is shown, that the qualified production technology enables cost efficient production, enhances the functionality by improving the heat dissipation within the slots, widens the design possibilities of laminations and windings and is applicable for stator mass production.

Satellite constellations and Distributed Spacecraft Mission (DSM) architectures offer unique benefits to Earth observation scientists and unique challenges to cost estimators. The Cost and Risk (CR) module of the Tradespace Analysis Tool for Constellations (TAT-C) being developed by NASA Goddard seeks to address some of these challenges by providing a new approach to cost modeling, which aggregates existing Cost Estimating Relationships (CER) from respected sources, cost estimating best practices, and data from existing and proposed satellite designs. Cost estimation through this tool is approached from two perspectives: parametric cost estimating relationships and analogous cost estimation techniques. The dual approach utilized within the TAT-C CR module is intended to address prevailing concerns regarding early design stage cost estimates, and offer increased transparency and fidelity by offering two preliminary perspectives on mission cost. This work outlines the existing cost model, details assumptions built into the model, and explains what measures have been taken to address the particular challenges of constellation cost estimating. The risk estimation portion of the TAT-C CR module is still in development and will be presented in future work. The cost estimate produced by the CR module is not intended to be an exact mission valuation, but rather a comparative tool to assist in the exploration of the constellation design tradespace. Previous work has noted that estimating the cost of satellite constellations is difficult given that no comprehensive model for constellation cost estimation has yet been developed, and as such, quantitative assessment of multiple spacecraft missions has many remaining areas of uncertainty. By incorporating well-established CERs with preliminary approaches to approaching these uncertainties, the CR module offers more complete approach to constellation costing than has previously been available to mission architects or Earth scientists seeking to leverage the capabilities of multiple spacecraft working in support of a common goal.

The design to cost is a major challenge for the practices of power modules' development especially when faced with very polymorphic demands. The technologies used are not always appropriate in view of the required technical specifications, or can be too expensive, or too basic. Developing a power module consists in making the best technological choices to fit the mission profile of an application; while serving the requirements at system level with a reasonable cost.

The fast moving consumer goods included a wide range of items. The basic characteristics of the fast moving consumer goods result in that the consumers’ buying habit is: simple, rapid, impulsive, emotional. In the trend of market segmentation, enterprises have to make the products respond quickly to design and manufacture under the premise of meeting functions. In the design process, designers find out design point by axiomatic design method, and then through a modular design, rapidly assemble the various elements thereby to design series of products with distinctive features in batch, so as to help enterprises to extend the product life cycle.

A cost estimation method is required to estimate the life cycle cost of a product family at the early stage of product development in order to evaluate the product family design. There are difficulties with existing cost estimation techniques in estimating the life cycle cost for a product family at the early stage of product development. This paper proposes a framework that combines a knowledge based system and an activity based costing techniques in estimating the life cycle cost of a product family at the early stage of product development. The inputs of the framework are the product family structure and its sub function. The output of the framework is the life cycle cost of a product family that consists of all costs at each product family level and the costs of each product life cycle stage. The proposed framework provides a life cycle cost estimation tool for a product family at the early stage of product development using high level information as its input. The framework makes it possible to estimate the life cycle cost of various product family that use any types of product structure. It provides detailed information related to the activity and resource costs of both parts and products that can assist the designer in analyzing the cost of the product family design. In addition, it can reduce the required amount of information and time to construct the cost estimation system.

Through the analysis of design ethics principle and content, the design concept of humanism, sustainable development and harmonious are applied to the Touch mouse product design practice, and analyzed the its positive significance in market research, product design positioning, concept sketches design, computer aided industrial design and shell structure design, effectively avoid the appear of various product function, complex modelling, large energy consumption and pollution mode, so as to design a fashion practical and green environmental protection Touch type new mouse, and provide a high quality IT products for consumers. Finally, the goal of balance and harmony between the people, resources and environment is realized.