Smart design engineering: a literature review of the impact of the 4th industrial revolution on product design and development

Abstract

Industrial revolutions (IRs) are mostly associated with how transformations regarding the operations of an enterprise affect said enterprise's manufacturing systems. However, the impact of these transformations exceeds the production systems themselves; rather, they affect the entire value chain, from the product design and development process (PDDP) through manufacturing and supply-chain management to marketing and disposal. As the new PDDP to a large extent defines the value chain for a company, the challenge lies in ensuring that the designed product will help the company fully benefit from the IRs. By analysing the 4th IR, the authors reveal that few publications shed light on this aspect. Consequently, the purpose of this study is to establish features and properties that will shape the PDDP throughout the 4th IR and into a smart design engineering. To accomplish this, the authors conduct a systematic review of the literature, which provides ten findings. These findings are then analysed by 11 specialists both from academia and the industry, and the findings' relations to the 4th IR and their impact on the product development process is discussed. By establishing these findings, this paper provides a platform for the understanding of what could potentially shape smart design engineering and its design-related activities.

Smart design engineering: leveraging product design and development to exploit the benefits from the 4th industrial revolution

“…Hermann, Figure 1. Changes driven by the industrial revolutionsadapted from (Pessoa & Jauregui-Becker 2020).…”

“…This paper aims at filling this gap by and further describes the 4th IR impact on design engineering and through the PDDP. In order to achieve this objective, this work starts from the smart design engineering features first identified by Pessoa & Jauregui-Becker (2020) and conduces a four-step research, each step aiming at answering a specific research question. Figure 2 shows how the paper was structured for following these steps and achieving the main objective.…”

“…To answer this question, specialists and researchers were asked if they would add any other feature to the initial findings. The respondents were the same 11 specialists contacted by Pessoa & Jauregui-Becker (2020) and 14 attendees from the smart design engineering and PSS workshop at the CIRP IPSS 2019 Conference. The choice of the CIRP IPSS Conference was due to its alignment to the product evolution perspective, as presented in Figure 1.…”

“…There were no two 3/21 respondents proposing the same additional feature and some of the propositions could be traced back to the initial set (Section 2.2). Here is the preliminary features list including both the original set as proposed by Pessoa & Jauregui-Becker (2020) and the ones coming from the survey:…”

“…Customer empowerment can happen either during the final product configuration definition or during the production process (Pessoa & Jauregui-Becker 2020). The former requires the designing of building blocks instead of finalized products and the latter means exploring the possibility that the customers produce themselves the final products.…”