Manufacturing has to cope with the continuously increasing variety of products, change of volumes and shortening product life cycles. These trends also affect the automotive sector: the frequent introduction of new models, materials and assembly technologies put the suppliers of make-to-order parts under pressure. In this context, the design of assembly systems and their management are of paramount importance for the companies' competitiveness. In this paper, we propose an approach for the design and reconfiguration of modular assembly systems through the integration of different computational tools addressing the design of the system, the optimization of the layout, the planning of reconfiguration actions as well as production planning. Integrating these computational tools and iterating through the resulting workflow and feedback allow to consider the outcomes and dependencies of alternative decision sequences holistically with the objective of an effective and efficient approach to production system design and management. The viability of the approach is demonstrated through the application to an automotive case study
This paper presents a Design For eXcellence (DFX) method for recyclability, resulting in a practical tool for product engineers. The tool enables an assessment of concept products as well as existing products and focuses on small domestic appliances recycled by shredding. The method enables quantifying recyclability performances of products by integrating a set of design guidelines, a recycling performance evaluation method, and prioritized improvement suggestions. After having the method implemented into a design support tool, a number of tests were executed. The preliminary tests of the method yield promising results, meeting expert expectations.
Multidisciplinary product development is well known for the complexity of its design process. It is commonly addressed by domain integration and a modular design approach. The former, often resulting in smaller products and integrated functions, is characterized by a complex non-linear design process. The latter, which may not result in such integrated functions, has a simpler -usually linear-design process, resulting in novel solutions. This paper presents a method for reducing design complexity of Multidisciplinary Domain Integrated Products by decomposing the problem into modular structures. Computational synthesis techniques are used to solve the resulting modules. Printed Circuit Board design is used as case study, as it is well known for its complexity and highly integrated product functionalities.
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