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The purpose of this paper is to present an interactive system to enable product design for disassembly and to offer robust and quick design solutions based on designers’ input.

The system utilizes an interactive questionnaire to communicate with the designer. The questionnaire is in the form of binary questions (Yes/No) and design questions that would enable the system to learn the objectives of the design. Solutions are based on a CAD supported design platform. The efficiency of each design is calculated using disassembly time as the metric of measurement using motion-time measurement (MTM). The designer would be able to make an informed decision with respect to component functionality, ease of disassembly and disassembly time. The paper presents a detailed framework and structure of this system.

The value of the system is corroborated by means of a case study of an actual product design. The system is structured to offer multiple solutions to a design problem so as to enable the designer to choose the option that best serves their needs.

This novel interactive system would accept customers’ design preferences as input and offer multiple solutions in order to solve the design problem. Process time is directly calculated using the MTM system of measurement by converting design features into time measurement units. Disassembly time can then be easily converted into disassembly cost by using standard conversion rates. The value to designers is obvious.

The complexity of manufacturing systems, on-going production and existing constraints on the shop floor remain among the main challenges for the analysis, design and development of the models in product, process and factory domains. The potential of different virtual factory (VF) tools and approaches to support simultaneous engineering for the design, and development of these domains has been addressed in the literature. To fulfil this potential, there is a need for an approach which integrates the product, process and production systems for designing and developing VF and its validation in real-life cases. This paper aims to present an integrated design approach for VF design and development, as well as a demonstration implemented in a wind turbine manufacturing plant.

As the research calls for instrumental knowledge to discover the effects of intervention on the operations of an enterprise, design science research methodology is considered to be a well-suited methodology for exploring practical usefulness of a generic design to close the theory–practice gap. The study was planned as an exploratory research activity which encompassed the simultaneous design and development of artefacts and retrospective analysis of the design and implementation processes. The extended VF concept, architecture, a demonstration and procedures followed during the research work are presented and evaluated.

The artefacts (models and methods) and the VF demonstrator, which was evaluated by industry experts and scholars based on the role of the VF in improving the performance in the evaluation and reconfiguration of new or existing factories, reduce the ramp-up and design times, supporting management decisions. Preliminary results are presented and discussed.

The concept VF model, its architecture and general methodology as an integrated design and development approach, can be adopted and used for VF design and development both for discrete and continuous manufacturing plants. The development and demonstration were limited, however, because real-time synchronisation, 3D laser scanning data and a commonly shared data model, to enable the integration of different VF tools, were not achievable.

The paper presents a novel VF concept and architecture, which integrates product, process and production systems. Moreover, design and development methods of the concept and its demonstration for a wind turbine manufacturing plant are presented. The paper, therefore, contributes to the information systems and manufacturing engineering field by identifying a novel concept and approach to the effective design and development of a VF and its function in the analysis, design and development of manufacturing systems.

There is an increasing focus on reducing time‐to‐market for new products and a prerequisite for succeeding in this is the ability to transfer and use information about the products early on in projects, thus facilitating early problem‐solving. This paper focuses on the use of product data and information systems for the design of materials supply systems in product development projects. The results from a case study show that there are product data available at an early stage in the project. However, the product data have to be retrieved from several information systems and from information systems, which the materials supply systems designers cannot use. In addition, product data can be obtained by means of personal communication much earlier than they can be retrieved from the information systems. It is concluded that research and development is required so that the information systems can be utilised for both early release and retrieval of preliminary information.

Rather than organize as traditional firms, many of today’s companies organize as platforms that sit at the nexus of multiple exchange and production relationships. This chapter considers a most basic question of organization in platform contexts: the choice of boundaries. Herein, I investigate how classical economic theories of firm boundaries apply to platform-based organization and empirically study how executives made boundary choices in response to changing market and technical challenges in the early mobile computing industry (the predecessor to today’s smartphones). Rather than a strict or unavoidable tradeoff between “openness-versus-control,” most successful platform owners chose their boundaries in a way to simultaneously open-up to outside developers while maintaining coordination across the entire system.

The recent shift towards accommodating flexibility in manufacturing companies and the complexity resulting from product variety highlight the significance of flexible assembly systems and designing products for them. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the requirements of a flexible assembly system for product design from the assembly system’s standpoint.

To fulfil the purpose of the paper, a literature review and a case study were performed. The case study was conducted with an interactive research approach in a global market leader company within the heavy vehicle manufacturing industry.

The findings indicate that common assembly sequence, similar assembly interfaces, and common parts are the main requirements of a flexible assembly system for product design which reduce complexity and facilitate various flexibility dimensions. Accordingly, a model is proposed to broaden the understanding of these requirements from the assembly system’s standpoint.

This study contributes to the overlapping research area of flexible assembly systems and product design.

The proposed model is largely based on practical data and clarifies the role of product design in facilitating flexibility in an assembly system. It can be used by assembly managers, assembly engineers, and product designers.

The key originality of this paper compared to the previous studies lies in presenting a novel assembly-oriented design model. The model enhances understanding of a flexible assembly system’s requirements for product design with regard to reducing complexity and managing variation in a flexible assembly system. These requirements can be applied to product design across various product families within a company’s product portfolio.

Some industrial organizations using computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM) for managing intelligent product and process data during a concurrent processing are facing acute implementation difficulties. Some of the difficulties are due to the fact that CIM – in the current form – is not able to adequately address knowledge management and concurrent engineering (CE) issues. Also, with CIM, it is not possible to solve problems related to decision and control even though there has been an increasing interest in subjects like artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge‐based systems (KBS), expert systems, etc. In order to improve the productivity gain through CIM, EDS focused its information technology (IT) vision on the combined potential of concurrent engineering (CE), knowledge management (KM) and computer‐integrated manufacturing (CIM) technologies. EDS – through a number of IT and CIM implementations – realized that CE, KM and CIM do go hand‐in‐hand. The three together provide a formidable base, which is called intelligent information system (IIS) in this paper. Describes the rationales used for creating an IIS framework at EDS, its usefulness to our clients and a make‐up of this emerging IIS framework for integrated product development.

The purpose of this paper is to address the problem in research of a lack of a holistic conceptual framework related to incremental and discontinuous innovation. Too often, the term “innovation” is used without an understanding of how it can be applied in a product design and supply chain fulfillment system. In this study, the goal is to develop a holistic “innovation continuum” to treat innovation as a complex adaptive system (CAS).

A comprehensive literature review was conducted, and from it, four propositions and a conceptual framework were developed.

The authors determined that an “innovation continuum” can be established through the use of a complex adaptive system. Two, incremental innovation is determined to possess adaptive qualities, and can be enhanced through the use of collaboration and evolutionary algorithms. Three, discontinuous innovation is established as a creative process enabled through expert designers, and improved through the use of generative design. Next, a supply chain system for incremental innovation can be assisted by the use of adaptive systems, but it is not proven that a generative customization system (for discontinuous innovation) can be improved through the use of a CAS.

The paper has established an “innovation continuum” linking incremental and discontinuous innovation within one holistic system. It establishes the use of evolutionary algorithms to improve the viability of incremental innovation, and generative design for discontinuous innovation. Finally, the concept of generative customization as an end to end product design and supply chain fulfillment solution for discontinuous innovation is established.

Many transportation companies struggle to effectively utilize the information provided by tracking technology for performing operational control. The research as presented in this paper aims to identify the problems underlying the inability to utilize tracking technology within this context. Moreover, this paper aims to contribute to solving these problems by proposing a set of design principles based on the concept of intelligent products.

The study as described in this paper adopts a design science research methodology consisting of three phases. First, a case study in a transportation company has been performed to identify the problems faced when utilizing tracking technology. Second, to overcome these problems, a set of design principles has been formulated. Finally, a prototype system based on the design principles has been developed and subjected to experimental and observational evaluation.

This paper identifies the problems associated with the utilization of tracking technology for the control of transport operations. Moreover, the proposed design principles support the development of information systems which overcome the identified problems and thereby enhance the utilization of tracking technology in a transportation context.

The commonly held perception that tracking technology will improve the ability to perform operational control does not unequivocally stand up to empirical scrutiny. While it is widely demonstrated that tracking technology is able to accurately capture the detailed operational information, it remains a fundamental challenge to transform this abundance of information into accurate and timely control decisions. This research provides a valuable contribution with respect to tackling this challenge, by identifying problems and providing solutions related to the utilization of readily available tracking technology.

In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop an integrated product development‐quality management (IPD‐QM) system by integrating the concepts of concurrent engineering (CE) and TQM. These two concepts have been considered in the past as a separate identity. However, there is a need to develop a system that would consider quality management and improvement at the design stage by incorporating the principles of total quality management (TQM) at every stage of the design and other upstream and downstream value adding activities. TQM has been considered with reference to firm orientation and identifies market advantages, that are product design efficiency, process efficiency and product reliability. The special feature of the system proposed here is that it advises designers, product developers and process planners on improvements that can be made to the design to improve product quality and manufacturing efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Also, a framework has been discussed in this paper for the integration of CE and TQM in manufacturing.

Existing models of product assembly scheme design often ignore the constraint relations among design thinking. In order to grasp the functions of each part and the constraint relations among them in product assembly system macroscopically, further design and variation of product assembly system should be made according to design thinking. This paper seeks to address these issues.

Through analyzing the similarity between biological organization system and product system and taking biology knowledge for reference, product assembly system was expressed as product function gene, product constraint gene, product function protein, product constraint protein and product cell and so on in this paper. The product gene model composed of product function gene groups and constraint genes was established and a modeling method based on it was proposed.

The author applied this method to model the 5‐DOF manipulator of complex diamond manufacturing special equipment with good results which proved the effectiveness of this modeling method.

By identifying constraint relations and design thinking in the gene model, the system makes the modification process which is conducted by the designers automatically identified and varied to achieve computer‐aided design and assembly.