From the Extraction of Currently Fulfilled Requirements to Value Curves: A Case Study in the Field of Harvesting Machines for Shell Fruits and Lessons Learnt in Engineering Design

Abstract

The market for agricultural machinery is characterized by products with a high degree of maturity in the product life cycle. Consequently, current improvements in new machinery are predominantly incremental and new projects basically use solutions that are already consolidated. This makes this domain appropriate for benchmarking existing systems and envisioning new value propositions. The present paper deals primarily with the former and uses the value curves as a means to structure the comparison among different families of technical systems; in particular, harvesting machines for shell fruits from the ground surface, e.g., chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts, were investigated here. The process of building value curves requires the identification of currently fulfilled requirements. Despite the attention paid by engineering design research to requirements, a structured process is lacking to extract relevant information and create value curves or other representations useful for benchmarking. The present paper approaches this problem and presents how the authors have individuated relevant knowledge for characterizing different categories of harvesting machines. Namely, after an extensive search of the scientific literature and patents, a critical review of existing machines, aimed at individuating their functioning principles, architecture, and attitude in fulfilling specific design requirements, was performed. Then, existing machines were classified in 8 main categories, and their strengths and weaknesses were identified with reference to 11 competing factors. The consequent construction of value curves enabled the identification of possible points of intervention by hypothesizing possible future evolutions of such machinery, both in a structural and in a value-based perspective. Limitations about the repeatability of the followed approach and possible repercussions on design research are discussed.

Editorial for the Special Issue “Requirements in Design Processes: Open Issues, Relevance and Implications”

“…Contribution [6] deals with the lack of structured processes to extract relevant information for benchmarking purposes in Product Planning. It presents an approach to identify and structure the relevant knowledge for innovating a product radically with respect to the definition of requirements.…”

“…This can be interpreted as a fundamental paucity towards the development of a unified and universal understanding of the design process, which some design researchers aim towards, with clear repercussions on (engineering) design education. It is unquestionable how the authors of studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] have used different interpretations and nuances of the word "requirements" and none of them can be contrasted. For this reason, the Guest Editors deem that the subject requires further studies and investigation, as well as a significant and substantial amount of theoretical research.…”