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The purpose of this paper is to present a model linking the role of design engineers to shared team knowledge, enhanced manufacturability, and product development outcomes. New product manufacturability is a quality of the product design that indicates the ease and reliability by which an organization develops products by using its manufacturing and supply chain resources.

The model is tested using a sample of 205 product development projects from firms in the USA and Canada.

The findings of the large‐scale empirical study suggest that by facilitating informing practices among functional specialists, design engineers help translate a functional portrayal of the product in terms of customer attributes, to a form description in terms of engineering characteristics, and then to a fabrication view in terms of manufacturing processes.

New product manufacturability can be a distinctive competency that provides competitive advantage by lowering costs, improving customer value, and speeding products to market.

In contrast to previous research that showed that role changes of design engineers have a narrow impact on development productivity (e.g. improving resource allocation), this paper suggests that these role changes of design engineers have a much broader impact on manufacturability and, through this, improve manufacturing cost, time‐to‐market, and value‐to‐customers.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practitioners of management with a sense of how collaborative team integration processes were required in order to be reasonably successful in attaining the required manufacturability goals. It aims to accomplish this by investigating: the role of team collaborative efforts in high‐technology projects associated with comparing aggressiveness towards and actual achievement on meeting time targets and manufacturing costs; the moderating effects of project‐team autonomy and control issues; and management involvement and top management support activities.

A review of the applied literature on collaborative team integration processes of manufacturers and direct suppliers of the smart card and automatic identification and data capture (AIDC)‐related industry in the USA was conducted. Only project managers and/or their designees were asked to complete the survey. The results of two mailings netted a total of 180 usable questionnaires out of an original sampling frame of 311 (response rate of appropriately 58 percent, with some missing data on a number of variables).

The paper finds that especially the variables of product acceleration, technological uncertainty, complexity, and product newness are traditionally outside the immediate control of the firm's project managers. The team integration variables, as measured by the factor scores of top management. manufacturing involvement, collaborative working environment, and supplier influence, offered the most explained variance in the present study.

By understanding the variety of team performance and integration constructs in high technology‐intensive and manufacturing environments, management may be able to take the steps to become more sensitive to the roles of not isolating team members and being able to relinquish control at the appropriate times in order to enhance manufacturability.

The rapid pace of internet products and web‐enabled services, especially in the high‐technology manufacturing industries, presents new strategic management issues to be addressed in project management. Understanding the many issues associated with project team management and integration within new‐product development/new‐product manufacturability processes may ultimately decrease the cost and promote timely introduction of beneficial commercial developments, if properly managed.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodology to estimate manufacturing complexity for both machining and layered manufacturing. The goal is to take into account manufacturing constraints at design stage in order to realize tools (dies and molds) by a combination of a subtractive process (high‐speed machining) and an additive process (selective laser sintering).

Manufacturability indexes are defined and calculated from the tool computer‐aided design (CAD) model, according to geometric, material and specification information. The indexes are divided into two categories: global and local. For local indexes, a decomposition of the tool CAD model is used, based on an octree decomposition algorithm and a map of manufacturing complexity is obtained.

The manufacturability indexes values provide a well‐detailed view of which areas of the tool may advantageously be machined or manufactured by an additive process.

Nowadays, layered manufacturing processes are coming to maturity, but there is still no way to compare these new processes with traditional ones (like machining) at the early design stage. In this paper, a new methodology is proposed to combine additive and subtractive processes, for tooling design and manufacturing. A manufacturability analysis is based on an octree decomposition, with calculation of manufacturing complexity indexes from the tool CAD model.

The manufacturability of extremely fine porous structures in the SLM process has rarely been investigated, leading to unpredicted manufacturing results and preventing steady medical or industrial application. The research objective is to find out the process limitation and key processing parameters for printing fine porous structures so as to give reference for design and manufacturing planning.

In metallic AM processes, the difficulty of geometric modeling and manufacturing of structures with pore sizes less than 350 μm exists. The manufacturability of porous structures in selective laser melting (SLM) has rarely been investigated, leading to unpredicted manufacturing results and preventing steady medical or industrial application. To solve this problem, a comprehensive experimental study was conducted to benchmark the manufacturability of the SLM process for extremely fine porous structures (less than 350 um and near a limitation of 100 um) and propose a manufacturing result evaluation method. Numerous porous structure samples were printed to help collect critical datasets for manufacturability analysis.

The results show that the SLM process can achieve an extreme fine feature with a diameter of 90 μm in stable process control, and the process parameters with their control strategies as well as the printing process planning have an important impact on the printing results. A statistical analysis reveals the implicit complex relations between the porous structure geometries and the SLM process parameter settings.

It is the first time to investigate the manufacturability of extremely fine porous structures of SLM. The method for manufacturability analysis and printing parameter control of fine porous structure are discussed.

This paper aims to improve the manufacturability of additive manufacturing (AM) for topology-optimized (TO) structures. Enhancement of manufacturability focuses on modifying geometric constraints and classifying the building orientation (BO) of AM parts to reduce stresses and support structures (SSs). To this end, artificial intelligence (AI) networks are being developed to automate design for additive manufacturing (DfAM).

This study considers three geometric constraints for their correction by convolutional autoencoders (CAEs) and transfer learning (TL). Furthermore, BOs of AM parts are classified using generative adversarial (GAN) and classification networks to reduce the SS. To verify the results, finite element analysis (FEA) is performed to compare the stresses of modified components with the original ones. Moreover, one sample is produced by the laser-based powder bed fusion (LB-PBF) in the BO predicted by the AI to observe its SSs.

CAE and TL resulted in promoting the manufacturability of TO components. FEA demonstrated that enhancing manufacturability leads to a 50% reduction in stresses. Additionally, training GAN and pre-training the ResNet-18 resulted in 80%, 95% and 96% accuracy for training, validation and testing. The production of a sample with LB-PBF demonstrated that the predicted BO by ResNet-18 does not require SSs.

This paper provides an automatic platform for DfAM of TO parts. Consequently, complex TO parts can be designed most feasibly and manufactured by AM technologies with minimal material usage, residual stresses and distortions.

This paper aims to explore the design and fabrication of meso-scale Manufacturing Process-Driven Structured Materials (MPDSMs). These are designed, architected materials where the prime design requirement is manufacturability. The concepts are applied to those fabricated using fused deposition modeling or fused filament fabrication (FDM/FFF), a thermoplastic polymer additive manufacturing (AM) process. Three case studies were presented to demonstrate the approach.

The paper consists of four main sections; the first developed the MPDSMs concept, the second explored manufacturability requirements for FDM/FFF in terms of MPDSMs, the third presented a practical application framework and the final sections provided some case studies and closing remarks.

The main contributions of this study were the definition and development of the MDPSMs concept, the application framework and the original case studies. While it is most practical to use a well-defined AM process to first explore the concepts, the MPDSMs approach is neither limited to AM nor thermoplastic polymer materials nor meso-scale material structures. Future research should focus on applications in other areas.

The MPDSMs approach as presented in this concept paper is a novel method for the design of structured materials where manufacturability is the prime requirement. It is distinct from classic design-for-manufacturability concepts in that the design space is limited to manufacturable design candidates before the other requirements are satisfied. This removes a significant amount of schedule and costs risk from the design process, as all the designs produced are manufacturable within the problem tolerance.

Among various efforts pursued to produce fuel efficient vehicles, light weight engineering (i.e. the use of low‐density structurally‐efficient materials, the application of advanced manufacturing and joining technologies and the design of highly‐integrated, multi‐functional components/sub‐assemblies) plays a prominent role. In the present work, a multi‐disciplinary design optimization methodology has been presented and subsequently applied to the development of a light composite vehicle door (more specifically, to an inner door panel). The door design has been optimized with respect to its weight while meeting the requirements /constraints pertaining to the structural and NVH performances, crashworthiness, durability and manufacturability. In the optimization procedure, the number and orientation of the composite plies, the local laminate thickness and the shape of different door panel segments (each characterized by a given composite‐lay‐up architecture and uniform ply thicknesses) are used as design variables. The methodology developed in the present work is subsequently used to carry out weight optimization of the front door on Ford Taurus, model year 2001. The emphasis in the present work is placed on highlighting the scientific and engineering issues accompanying multidisciplinary design optimization and less on the outcome of the optimization analysis and the computational resources/architecture needed to support such activity.

Additive manufacture (AM) such as selective laser melting (SLM) provides significant geometric design freedom in comparison with traditional manufacturing methods. Such freedom enables the construction of injection moulding tools with conformal cooling channels that optimize heat transfer while incorporating efficient internal lattice structures that can ground loads and provide thermal insulation. Despite the opportunities enabled by AM, there remain a number of design and processing uncertainties associated with the application of SLM to injection mould tool manufacture, in particular from H13/DIN 1.2344 steel as commonly used in injection moulds. This paper aims to address several associated uncertainties.

A number of physical and numerical experimental studies are conducted to quantify SLM-manufactured H13 material properties, part manufacturability and part characteristics.

Findings are presented which quantify the effect of SLM processing parameters on the density of H13 steel components; the manufacturability of standard and self-supporting conformal cooling channels, as well as structural lattices in H13; the surface roughness of SLM-manufactured cooling channels; the effect of cooling channel layout on the associated stress concentration factor and cooling uniformity; and the structural and thermal insulating properties of a number of structural lattices.

The contributions of this work with regards to SLM manufacture of H13 of injection mould tooling can be applied in the design of conformal cooling channels and lattice structures for increased thermal performance.

Examines design for manufacturability (DFM) which has become of a paramount interest to academicians and practitioners as well. The emergence of advanced manufacturing and information technologies and recent managerial philosophies such as JIT, TQM have made it easier for manufacturing enterprises to carry out many of their activities concurrently. This new approach to business would no doubt result in increased efficiency, as measured by cost savings, and increased effectiveness as measured by improvements in quality, flexibility, and responsiveness. This new approach to manufacturing emphasizes that simultaneous improvement in these competitive priorities rather than trade‐offs will be the norm in many manufacturing establishments. Design for manufacturability, as a time‐based strategy, has been used by the Japanese for many years, and there is no reason to think that it will not work for Western manufacturers. However, if not planned for carefully, it can hurt rather than help manufacturing companies. In the cases that have been reported in literature so far, successes outnumber failures. Sheds light on the theoretical foundation of DFM as a time‐based technology. Examines the different approaches to product and processes design and compares and contrasts the traditional and concurrent approaches to manufacturing. Examines a number of DFM definitions in an attempt to offer a more representative definition. Analyses the main pillars of DFM and explains the necessary characteristics for successful implementation of DFM. Elaborates the benefits of DFM as reported in literature. Explains some of the drawbacks of DFM and introduces the reader to Part 2 of this article.

This paper aims to provide a multi-objective optimization problem in design for manufacturing (DFM) approach for fused deposition modeling (FDM). This method considers the manufacturing criteria and constraints during the design by selecting the best manufacturing parameters to guide the designer and manufacturer in fabrication with FDM.

Topological optimization and bi-objective optimization problems are suggested to complete the DFM approach for design for additive manufacturing (DFAM) to define a product. Topological optimization allows the shape improvement of the product through a material distribution for weight gain based on the desired mechanical behavior. The bi-objective optimization problem plays an important role to evaluate the manufacturability by quantification and optimization of the manufacturing criteria and constraint simultaneously. Actually, it optimizes the production time, required material regarding surface quality and mechanical properties of the product because of two significant parameters as layer thickness and part orientation.

A comprehensive analysis of the existing DFAM approaches illustrates that these approaches are not developed sufficiently in terms of manufacturability evaluation in quantification and optimization levels. There is no approach that investigates the AM criteria and constraints simultaneously. It is necessary to provide a decision-making tool for the designers and manufacturers to lead to better design and manufacturing regarding the different AM characteristics.

To assess the efficiency of this approach, a wheel spindle is considered as a case study which shows how this method is capable to find the best design and manufacturing solutions.

A multi-criteria decision-making approach as the main contribution is developed to analyze FDM technology and its attributes, criteria and drawbacks. It completes the DFAM approach for FDM through a bi-objective optimization problem which deals with finding the best manufacturing parameters by optimizing production time and material mass because of the product mechanical properties and surface roughness.