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The development in the past decade of Industry 4.0 technologies has brought many new opportunities to manufacturers. The increased digitization of manufacturing operations has led to new modes of production and product development. This digitization has also increased the quantity of sensorial data which is easily available and which can be used to support real-time decision making. That said, with the oppor– tunities come as well a number of challenges. Principally amongst these is a skills gap within the workforce. Without the required knowledge organisations will find it difficult and complex not only to employ these technologies, but also to develop the new manufacturing paradigms of tomorrow. Hence an innovative and effective training methodology is required to address this skills and knowledge gap. As part of the development of this methodology, this paper presents the finding of a study carried out to analyse the knowledge and skills gap, preferred learning methods and styles of trainers, current and past students in engineering Higher Education Institutions. This requirements analysis has led to the specifications for a Digital Training Toolbox, which can be utilised to support the implementation of Inudstry 4.0 technologies and organisational concepts., peer-reviewed

With design methodologies, as Integrated Product Development, industry is continuously looking to improve their product development processes. Staying ahead concurrence forces them to deliver new and more complex products in shorter time. When it comes to fast delivery and requirement changes, product development can be inspired by agile methods. Although the application is difficult, the idea to implement these methods for development of products other than software comes out. To ease its implementation, this paper proposes to use IPD as a framework for agile product development.

Hip joint arthroplasty is considered to be a safe, successful and cost-effective procedure to restore hip joint functionality. However, a successful hip joint arthroplasty affects different stakeholders e.g. patient and surgeon and depends on various influencing factors within the product life cycle as well as the applied technological opportunities. Due to the complex dependencies between influencing factors, technological opportunities and stakeholders, this contribution introduces an IPD-based approach to improve the quality of total hip arthroplasties.

Increasingly competitive markets are putting pressure on product development teams to design products which exploit an emotional connection to users in order to distinguish them from their competitors. Researchers at the University of Malta have been engaged in understanding the challenges of designing emotionally pleasing products by studying the product development process of a number of artefacts ranging from cosmetic packaging for the make-up sector, camera enclosures to hand prosthesis. Based on the experience garnered from these case studies the researchers have been able to generalize an approach they term Engustrial design that systematically merges industrial and engineering design. This paper explains this innovative approach by applying it to the design of a camera case enclosure and further argues that a new educational approach is required to help minimize such diverse designer mindsets.

This study aims to assess whether ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene (UHMWPE) fibers can be successfully embedded in a polylactic acid (PLA) matrix in a material extrusion 3D printing (ME3DP) process, despite the apparent thermal incompatibility between the two materials. The work started with assessing the maximum PLA extrusion temperatures at which UHMWPE fibers withstand the 3D printing process without melting or severe degradation. After testing various fiber orientations and extrusion temperatures, it has been found that the maximum extrusion temperature depends on fiber orientation relative to extrusion pathing and varies between 175 &deg, C and 185 &deg, C at an ambient temperature of 25 &deg, C. Multiple specimens with embedded strands of UHMWPE fibers have been 3D printed and following tensile strength tests on the fabricated specimens, it has been found that adding even a small number of fiber strands laid in the same direction as the load increased tensile strength by 12% to 23% depending on the raster angle, even when taking into account the decrease in tensile strength due to reduced performance of the PLA substrate caused by lower extrusion temperatures.

Due to highly competitive markets, constantly shifting consumer requirements, and technological advances, product families are continuously evolving over time. This product evolution leads to new part variants being added to the existing part mix. When at a future time the manufacturing system is not capable, as is or in a reconFigured state, to manufacture the evolved part variants, then this has negative consequences on business performance. This phenomena is being termed as disruptive product evolution. Due to complex interdependencies, incomplete information and uncertainty in manufacturing requirements this phenomena leads to a wicked problem. In order to tame such a wicked problem, this paper contributes and evaluates a knowledge-based decision-making approach that supports manufacturing system designers in exploring the interplay between business strategy, evolving product range and manufacturing systems. A prototype digital factory tool based on this approach has been developed and evaluated. The encouraging results obtained have shown that this research paves the way for the development and integration of such knowledge-based decision-making approaches within state of the art digital factory tools.

3D printed specimens (ASTM D638 Type I) were manufactured from ABS and ASA material via additive manufacturing through material extrusion 3D printing (ME3DP). During manufacturing, the printing process has been paused, pre-impregnated biaxial or uniaxial glass fiber mesh has been placed onto the ABS/ASA substrate and then the printing process has been resumed. The obtained composite specimens have been subjected to tensile strength testing and results have been compared to those of specimens printed from homogenous material. The influence of raster angle, glass fiber direction and mesh density on resulting toughness has also been analyzed. It was found that inserting uniaxial glass fiber increases toughness of specimens in the axial direction, with a drop in layer adhesion if biaxial fiber is used. Test specimens manufactured with 30 uniaxial fiber strands embedded in a 0o raster angle 3D printed thermoplastic matrix match mechanical characteristics of injection-molded parts. The maximum mesh density without leading to delamination is one layer of glass fiber every two layers of thermoplastic matrix.

Product development has to increasingly handle challenges such as highly competitive market scenarios and rapidly changing customer demands. The Industry 4.0 paradigm has brought about a new range of methods and technologies which can support industry in dealing with these challenges. This paper contributes a digital manufacturing model which aims to support industry to bridge the gap with this advanced digital technologies and foster integrated product development. This digital model achieves this aim by providing a means to illustrate how these technologies can be employed during the different phases of the factory life cycle. The digital manufacturing model also illustrates the soft and meta-skills which need to be developed in order to support digitisation of product development activities. A number of use cases are presented which explore how Industry 4.0 technologies can be implemented within an integrated product development environment.

Aging societies have an extended need for transportation solutions that enhance elderly’s independence. However, the solutions needed are as manifold as the elderly's lifestyles are. This study uses User-centred Design principles as a structuring tool to manage this complexity of requirements. By not just focusing on specific functionalities but also reflecting product life cycle and usage context, new types of requirements can be revealed. Through a case study, this article shows how a participatory design approach can lead to integrated solutions that better fit the user's needs.

Changing production systems and product requirements can trace their origin in volatile customer behaviour and evolving product requirements. This dynamic nature of customer requirements has been described as a constantly moving target, thus presenting a significant challenge for several aspects of product development. To deal with this constant and sometimes unpredictable product evolution, cyber physical production systems (CPPS) that employ condition monitoring, self-awareness and reconfigurability principles, have to be designed and implemented. This research contributes a CPPS design approach that proactively provides the required CPPS design knowledge. This approach aims to minimise or avoids future consequences and disruptions on the CPPS. This knowledge needs to be provided at the right time whilst not being intrusive to the production system designer's cognitive activity. To effectively deal with the complexity of the cyber physical production system design activity with a manual method would lead to a time consuming, and complex support tool which is hard to implement, and difficult to use. The CPPS design approach has therefore been implemented in a prototype digital factory tool. This paper describes in detail the system requirements and system architecture for this tool. In order to establish the effectiveness of the proposed approach for designing cyber physical production systems, the prototype digital factory tool has been evaluated with a case study and a number of semi-structured interviews with both industrial and scientific stakeholders. The encouraging results obtained from this research evaluation have shown that such an approach for supporting the CPPS design activity makes stakeholders aware of their decision consequences and is useful in practice. This result can lead the way for the development and integration of such knowledge-based decision-making approaches within state-of-the-art digital factory and Computer Aided Engineering Design (CAED) tools.

Manufacturing system design is a complex and demanding activity and the system designer has to take many factors into consideration during the development process including the demand and technological requirements of the products or product families. Central to this activity is the synthesis decision making process, during which the designer defines the elements that will make up the manufacturing system. This research identifies in the decision making process a critical activity and contributes a phenomena that can be used by a framework to support designers to address complex issues such as changeability and the evolution of products over the manufacturing system life-cycle., This research work was partially funded through an ERDF Project (Project No. ERDF083). The first and second authors would therefore like to thank the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) who is administering this project., peer-reviewed

We have used a simple camera phone to significantly improve an `exploration system' for astrobiology and geology. This camera phone will make it much easier to develop and test computer-vision algorithms for future planetary exploration. We envision that the `Astrobiology Phone-cam' exploration system can be fruitfully used in other problem domains as well., 15 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology

Increasing market pressure is forcing manufacturing companies to improve product lead times and quality at reduced cost. An important approach aimed at tackling these problems is to generate manufacturing/assembly system models concurrently with the design solutions of a component. A designer can therefore make product design decisions while having access to, and interacting with, the evolving ‘virtual’ manufacturing system models. This allows designers to foresee any potential manufacturing problems caused by design decisions. This paper presents an approach that proactively supports designers in making informed design decisions, through the timely revelation of knowledge about manufacturing and assembly processes. Such knowledge, when provided early in the design process, allows designers to avoid negative implications and to use positive ones. Based on this approach, a knowledge-intensive computer aided design (KICAD) prototype tool, named FORESEE, has been developed. FORESEE is a proof-of-concept system and allows designers to foresee and explore manufacturing and assembly consequences caused by design decisions, as the design of a mechanical component evolves. The paper presents an outline of the KICAD approach, together with a brief description of FORESEE's architecture and implementation. The application of FORESEE is demonstrated through a thermoplastic component design case study. FORESEE has been evaluated by practising designers. Evaluation results indicate that the approach has the potential proactively to support component design.

Mass customization and the evolution of products provide significant challenges to manufacturing system designers. Paradigms such as changeability, product process co-evolution and product platform development have been developed over the years to tackle these challenges. This research work identifies the synthesis decision-making activity in manufacturing system design to be a critical aspect of the development cycle, since many factors have to be taken into consideration. These include technical factors such as machine capability, but also uncertainty due to changing business and product elements. This research therefore aims to provide manufacturing system designers with an insight of the consequences of synthesis decisions on the range of products that can be manufactured by the evolving manufacturing system by contributing a manufacturing capability measure based on product range capability.

This paper deals with the development of a computational framework that aims to facilitate innovative endeavours during product development. A problem analysis carried out revealed that both stakeholder collaboration and artefact simulation are considered important for supporting innovation, the first through the availability of more ideas and the latter for analysing the feasibility of these ideas prior to their implementation in practice. However, it was observed that the use of collaboration tools and simulation tools is still lacking in practice mainly due to lack of awareness or perceived lack of necessity. This research thus aims to develop a framework that helps support innovation in product development through the use of these tools. From the preliminary evaluation of the solution developed, it was found that the portal and its underlying framework are indeed useful for supporting innovation.

As products become more complex, a significant amount of design knowledge support is required by designers during the design process. However, given that the design process is not only confined within a design office, knowledge support must be provided to designers even when they are away from their usual workplace. This provision of knowledge is essential for designers to take sound decisions that span through the whole product life-cycle, from the conceptual design stage to the disposal phase. Hence, designers require design tools that support them at considering the consequences based on these decisions. With the ever-increasing popularity of mobile devices (such as PDAs, smartphones and pocket PCs), access to such knowledge can be greatly facilitated. The contribution of this paper consists in the presentation of a mobile Knowledge Management (mKM) system architecture that provides distributed engineering designers situated in mobile work settings with design knowledge support in the form of ‘life-cycle consequences’ during the design process.

Despite that paper-based freehand sketching is still widely used during the conceptual design phase, few are the tools available which allow designers to exploit sketches resulting from this activity at a later design phase. This paper reports the ongoing research on a prototype tool nicknamed mX-Sketch, which addresses this lack of support by linking ‘freehand paper-based’ sketches with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technology. Given that paper-based sketches are also used by mobile designers to express their ideas, the rapid transfer and automatic generation of 3D virtual models from such sketches provide real-time design collaboration. Since a paper-based freehand sketch is inherently vague, the 3D form idea is clarified by means of symbols representing 2D geometric constraints (e.g. perpendicularity). As a result, mX-Sketch produces a parametric 3D virtual model which can be potentially used downstream in the design process and exchanged in real-time in collaborative design scenarios.

The research work described here establishes a new design support approach to product life-oriented design. The approach defines a broad concept of design context information. Having completed the function design, the approach supports the product design through background reasoning using the design context information. This reasoning mechanism can facilitate a designer to explore rapidly different design alternatives generated through function to its realisation (means) mapping. “Unfit” means can be identified using the design context information. The approach provides further support in making suggestions by relaxation as to how to avoid a solution candidate being identified as an “unfit” life-oriented design solution. The architecture and its implementation of a prototype KICAD system entitled FORESEE II is detailed in the paper. The concept of the approach and an illustrative use of the FORESEE II system through a case study are also described.

The research reported in this paper concerns the ongoing development of a Knowledge Intensive Sketching (KiS) framework through which designers are supported in foreseeing directly from their paper-based sketches the relevant life-cycle consequences of their ‘component form’ solution concepts. The goal of the KiS framework is to retain the important characteristics of freehand sketching, i.e. pencil and paper, whilst at the same time exploit the benefits of Knowledge Intensive CAD technology for proactively guiding designers in generating life-oriented solutions as from early design.

Increasing competition requires more and more effort in delivering new products with better prices, good quality and environment savings. In this scenario, since most of the cost and product characteristics are dependent on commitments taken at the early design stages, designers require tools supporting them at considering the consequences of their decisions on the whole product life-cycle, starting from the conceptual design stage to the disposal phase. The adoption of such tools may enforce the exploration of different alternatives thus increasing the possibility of identifying the most convenient and innovative solution. Form features have been recognized as shape-oriented elements for associating geometry with engineering meaning, thus helping in reasoning on products in functional terms. However as argued in this paper, information on shape alone is insufficient for meaningful evaluation and forecast of life-cycle product consequences. The paper presents an approach for considering ‘life-cycle consequences’ during the design decision process, by taking into account both artefact features and the characteristics of the involved life-cycle systems.

The interaction of an artefact with different life-phase systems can give rise to a number of consequences. ‘Artefact’ and ‘life-phase system’ design decisions can therefore result in unintended consequences that have a propagation effect across multiple life-phases such as manufacturing, use and disposal. Handling this phenomena during design is thus a necessity if designers are to generate ‘life-oriented’ solutions. However, the sequence of life-phases makes knowledge of such life-cycle consequences (LCCs) available late, after decisions have been committed. Thus, designers are frequently unaware of LCCs co-evolving with their solution, this making ‘life-oriented’ solution generation difficult to achieve. Designers are simultaneously under increasing pressures to deliver artefacts that cater for a host of total life-cycle issues. This paper concerns on-going research into the development of a knowledge intensive approach framework to handle this DFX phenomena during the synthesis of mechanical component life solutions. The framework collectively describes the concept of how a domain specific LCC knowledge model can be generated and operated to support this DFX problem, thereby contributing to the development of KICAD architectures.

Product designers are under increasing pressure to reduce lead time, improve quality and reduce cost of a product. An important approach is to generate not only design solutions of a component, but also manufacturing models for the component at the same time so that a designer can make design decisions whilst having access to evolving “virtual” manufacturing system models. This paper presents such an approach that proactively supports designers to make informed design decisions, by revealing knowledge of component related manufacturing and assembly processes. Knowing the manufacturing and assembly implications of design decisions during design, designers are aided to avoid negative implications and promote positive ones. Based on the approach a Knowledge Intensive CAD (KICAD) prototype tool, named FORESEE has been developed. FORESEE allows designers to foresee and explore manufacturing and assembly consequences caused by design decisions, co-evolving during mechanical component design decision making. The paper presents an outline of the KICAD’s approach, its architecture, system requirements of such a system and its implementation. The application of the prototype is also demonstrated through a thermoplastic component design session.

Designers are now expected to ‘generate’ life-oriented design solutions. This transition to ‘Design Synthesis for Multi-X (DFΣX)’ reflects an increase in demands being put on designers. This paper reports on the development and implementation of a Knowledge Intensive CAD (KICAD) tool aimed at proactively supporting designers in foreseeing and exploring multiple life-cycle consequences co-evolving during mechanical artefact design decision making. A phenomena model describing ‘how’ consequences are generated highlights the necessity of designers engaging in concurrent synthesis. This understanding is exploited by a ‘Knowledge of Consequences’ approach to DFΣX on which the KICAD implementation is based. The paper includes an outline of the KICAD’s knowledge model, system requirements and architecture. The application of a prototype named FORESEE to pro-actively supporting ‘life-oriented’ exploration is demonstrated via a thermoplastic component design scenario. An evaluation of the prototype revealed strengths and limitations that highlight future research challenges for developing KICAD tools aimed at supporting DFΣX.

Despite that paper-based freehand sketching is still widely used during the conceptual design phase, few are the tools available that allow designers to exploit sketches resulting from this activity at a later design phase. This paper reports the ongoing research on a prototype tool nicknamed mX-Sketch , which addresses this lack of support by linking freehand paper-based sketches with Computer-Aided Design (CAD) technology. Given that paper-based sketching is also used by designers outside their office to express their ideas, the rapid transfer and automatic generation of 3D virtual models from such sketches provide real-time design collaboration. Since a paper-based freehand sketch is inherently vague, the 3D form idea is clarified by means of symbols representing 2D geometric constraints (e.g. perpendicularity). As a result, mX-Sketch produces a parametric 3D virtual model, which can be potentially used downstream in the design process and exchanged in real time in collaborative design scenarios.

Despite the importance of the early design phase, designers still lack computer support in rapidly modelling their form concepts in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems due to the rigid User-Interface. Owing to its efficacy in instantly capturing ideas, traditional pen-and-paper sketching is still very popular amongst designers to record their concepts not only inside but also outside their office. This paper reports the ongoing research aimed at developing a portable, sketch-based tool allowing designers to obtain and share 3D CAD models on cameraphones directly from paper sketches. More specifically, the focus is on a prescribed sketching alphabet required to create a seamless link between sketching and CAD. Results of semi-structured interviews carried out with various design practitioners contribute important insights into the alphabet suitability. Further, the results and an implemented tool indicate that a sketching language based on this alphabet will be beneficial for designers, especially in a collaborative design environment.

The tool tip motion characteristics required for machining turned components on automatic lathes is a typical example where the compound movements generated by more than one cam plate are practically employed. Achieving problem specific tool tip motion characteristic requires considerable expertise and time in designing two separate planar cams, which when synchronized result in the desired turned component geometric shape. The objective of this paper is to present the analytical models adopted in the design, development and implementation of a computer based prototype tool for supporting the design and manufacture of such planar cams employed by automatic lathes. Evaluation of this prototype reveals that the use of cam profile blending models and edge vector based cam milling path approach, are a beneficial way of employing computers in industry to support the generation of cam plates that cater for profile blending problems inherent with synchronized cams.