In the development of mechatronic systems, it is important to differentiate the products to be developed from those of the competitors, but also from the own product generations already available on the market. However, there are uncertainties regarding the correct features to be differentiated from the customer and user perspective and how these features should be designed. Nevertheless, despite the high impact, decisions must be taken early in the development process. Within this publication, a method to support in this respect was derived based on the findings of the Model of PGE - Product Generation Engineering and the Kano-Model. Therefore, experienceable product features and reference system elements as characteristics of these are evaluated according to the Kano-Model and thus made comparable with regard to the customers and user satisfaction. The objective is to select the product features to be differentiated and the corresponding reference system elements in such a way that a desired level of customer and user satisfaction is achieved. In order to evaluate the method, it was applied in a real development project. It was found that the application of the method led to a reduction of the existing uncertainty.

There have been growing uses of semantic networks in the past decade, such as leveraging large-scale pre-trained graph knowledge databases for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks in engineering design research. Therefore, the paper provides a survey of the research that has employed semantic networks in the engineering design research community. The survey reveals that engineering design researchers have primarily relied on WordNet, ConceptNet, and other common-sense semantic network databases trained on non-engineering data sources to develop methods or tools for engineering design. Meanwhile, there are emerging efforts to mine large scale technical publication and patent databases to construct engineering-contextualized semantic network databases, e.g., B-Link and TechNet, to support NLP in engineering design. On this basis, we recommend future research directions for the construction and applications of engineering-related semantic networks in engineering design research and practice.

This research investigates service creation in/after effect of coronavirus pandemic targeting the essential business environment. It follows prevention through design approach to facilitate business owners to maintain their business environments at low COVID contraction risks, for both customers and staff. The effectiveness of recommended prevention practices (like social distancing and hand-sanitising) is uncertain at public workplaces, simply due to inevitable workers and customers interactions. Such uncertainty, especially in cases of retail stores and hospitals, raises a need for the design of services and support systems for common/necessary public business activities to reduce the burden on people involved. This research investigates the risk-related metrics to realise such digital services, focussing on three types: congestion at the work environment, disinfection of store area/objects, and sanitisation of people and staffs involved. Based on this, a digital technology-based service COVSAFE was created and tested through a proof-of-concept implementation for a supermarket business environment. This implementation and its evaluations highlight the bottlenecks/challenges for realising this system in everyday scenarios.

Systems thinking is vital for engineering of nowadays systems characterized by system spanning interactions and an incresing amount of functions. Systems Engineering (SE) represents an interdisciplinary approach, gaining extensive attention to cope with increasing system complexity. Implementation of SE in existing organizations and processes, however, is facing challenges. As a matter of course there is not out of the box concept to be used, in fact definitions and understandings seem to be based on the background and experience of the individual or organization und differ widely. Thus, motivations and expectations of practitioner are manifold and support to adapte and implement SE-methodolgies is needed. Research presented in this contribution picks up the need to provide orientation for individuals, engineering teams and project managers when implementing SE and to address the specific context in that engineering is carried out. Objective is to describe the core idea of SE by a consistent set of principles. This set is used to build up a context specific understanding of SE as a foundation to introduce new methods and procedures in existing method ecosystems.

The Covid-19 outbreak forced many universities across the world to transition from a traditional or blended format to fully online education. This paper presents a case study on the transition to an online education format for a circular design course. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through a survey with 26 students and interviews with six course teachers. The findings revealed that students preferred the on-campus versions over the online course components. They indicated the perceived lack of motivation, lack of sense of community, and a high workload as influencing factors. Teachers indicated the lack of connection with students as a drawback to online education but identified advantages to their teaching and the student’s learning experience. Suggestions for addressing an optimal blended course format are provided.

Feedback loops are a key characteristic of engineering design processes that increase complexity, time to market, and costs. However, some feedback loops, due to design iteration, have a positive impact on design outcomes (i.e., the quality of the final design), so are worth the time and costs incurred. Other loops, resulting from rework, also have a positive impact on the final design but their impact on current projects, in terms of their urgency and so interruption, is high. Thus, overall, and drawing on socio-technical systems literature, some feedback loops are virtuous circles with a positive impact whereas others are vicious circles with a negative impact. In this paper, we report early work exploring these interplays between rework and design iteration through the development of process simulation models.

The increased demand for customer-adapted product solutions shows an increasing trend of product variety, leading to an increased internal variety and therefore -costs. The concept of modularization provides apossible solution to this challenge by developing modular kits. Nevertheless, modularization methods to not lead to one individual modular kit, but to several alternatives. The decision of which alternative to implement can be crucial to the applying companys succes. During this decision-making both customer- and company perspectives need to be taken into account. This contribution is to present a simulation-based approach to support the decision making by using a model-based configuration system. Furthermore, as classical decision-making processes are based upon historical data, future aspects are usually not taken into account. In order to counteract this situation, this contribution intends to simulate as well future aspects impacting the modular product architecture. In this case, the simulation is used in order to evaluate the individual performances of a Design-for-Variety product architecture as opposed to a Design-for-Future-Robustness by applying this method to the example of customer-individual laser machines.

A comminution process is a material size reduction and separation process which is primarily used in the aggregates and the minerals processing industry. Knowledge related to equipment’s operation, raw material properties, operational strategies, control system, maintenance, etc. is needed to design a capable plant. New needs are arising from the industry for existing operational crushing plants such as investigation for improvements, upscaling, and downscaling of the capacity. The paper presents an application of simulation-driven development for a crushing plant in an existing gold processing plant. Due to the change in ore characteristics and the need for optimizing the cost of operation, it is required to investigate the opportunities for improvement and alternative options for downscaling the capacity of the plant. A systematic process for configuring, developing, and evaluating alternative concepts using a process simulation tool is presented. The results show the process of generating knowledge for alternative crushing plant operation settings and how the choices can be selected and eliminated using boundary conditions. The evaluation presents possible improvements and alternative concepts with their opportunities and pitfalls.

The success of complex product development projects strongly depends on the clear definition of target factors that allow a reliable statement about the fulfilment of the product requirements. In the context of tolerancing and robust design, Key Characteristics (KCs) have been established for this purpose and form the basis for all downstream activities. In order to integrate the activities related to the KC definition into product development as early as possible, the often vaguely formulated requirements must be translated into quantifiable KCs. However, this is primarily a manual process, so the results strongly depend on the experience of the design engineer.

In order to overcome this problem, a novel computer-aided approach is presented, which automatically derives associated functions and KCs already during the definition of product requirements. The approach uses natural language processing and formalized design knowledge to extract and provide implicit information from the requirements. This leads to a clear definition of the requirements and KCs and thus creates a founded basis for robustness evaluation at the beginning of the concept design stage. The approach is exemplarily applied to a window lifter.

Maintenance decision making is an important part of managing the costs, effectiveness and risk of maintenance. One way to improve maintenance efficiency without affecting the risk picture is to group maintenance jobs. Literature includes many examples of algorithms for the grouping of maintenance activities. However, the data is not always available, and with increasing plant complexity comes increasingly complex decision requirements, making it difficult to leave the decision making up to algorithms.

This paper suggests a framework for the standardisation of maintenance data as an aid for maintenance experts to make decisions on maintenance grouping. The standardisation improves the basis for decisions, giving an overview of true variance within the available data. The goal of the framework is to make it simpler to apply tacit knowledge and make right decisions.

Applying the framework in a case study showed that groups can be identified and reconfigured and potential savings easily estimated when maintenance jobs are standardised. The case study enabled an estimated 7%-9% saved on the number of hours spent on the investigated jobs.

Fast fashion, with its focus on cheap clothing and everchanging trends, has an enormous negative environmental and social impact. Despite rising consumer awareness and slow fashion as an emerging trend, many consumers often still rely on fast fashion. This research aims to create insights into why customers keep returning to fast fashion and what is holding them back from buying sustainable fashion. This is done through a quantitative survey (n=521) and qualitative semi-structured interviews (n=9). Based on the findings, opportunities are defined for designers on how, where, and when to intervene, and on which target group to focus. The main obstacles that counter slow fashion are (i) a lack of understandable and clear information, (ii) the price or available budget, and (iii) the importance of social influence. Strategic design interventions should focus on educating eco-conscious and social-conscious customers based on their personal definition of sustainable fashion. By providing in-store information during time of purchase, designers can create new shopping experiences, educate customers using a positive note and build customer relations with the retailer. Further research should extend these insights with retailers' perspectives.

Structure sharing (SS) and multi-mode integration (MMI) are types of sharing in designs that help in resource effectiveness. This research explores their prevalence in successful designs. To do this: (a) 5 award-winning designs from International Design Excellence Awards are chosen, information of these designs is used to construct their Function-Means Tree and this is used to check whether they exhibit SS or MMI, and (b) 250+ award-winning designs are examined via a longitudinal study to check whether they exhibit SS or MMI. The following observations are made: (a) both SS and MMI are seen at systemic and sub-systemic levels, (b) both SS and MMI are and can be present in designs and (c) close to 35% of 250+ designs examined exhibited SS or MMI. These are fundamental insights, have not been reported earlier and build on the existing work on SS and MMI.

Human augmentation is a thriving research field that aims to amplify human abilities through the development of technological improvements as an integral part of the human body. Human augmentation products may be made for anyone, ranging from healthy users wanting to enhance their human abilities to users who face temporary or permanent disabilities, physical impairments, or perilous situations that oblige them to use these products.

This article attempts to introduce readers to the domain of human augmentation by providing a thorough formulation of the concept and its related terms to develop a more solid structural basis. Additionally, a categorical and dimensional classification of the field was given. Based on these findings, we then proposed a novel framework in the form of a diagrammatic presentation of both classifications, which could enable product designers to better understand and characterize the type of human augmentation product they are designing by determining its location in the diagram. Finally, the proposed framework was evaluated by introducing and classifying several significant human augmentation products most of which have proven to successfully exceed human abilities.

Engineering design has a broad variety of approaches, methods and methodologies to conduct, evaluate and validate research. This contribution focuses on empirical studies and divides existing approaches and classifies them according to a scheme with criteria and boundary conditions, such as participants (students, researchers), the length of the study, the incorporation of the study into the curriculum etc. There are certain ideas, challenges and recommended practices associated with each environment and scenario. Knowing them will help design method developers in engineering design who want to conduct empirical studies but have little or no experience with student participants. Therefore, conducted studies from the research institute are mapped onto the classification scheme and synthesized challenges and recommended practices associated with laboratory conditions and student participants will be presented.

Understanding emergence is an important goal of system thinking, as it can express both desirable and negative properties of products and systems. Emergence has also a special importance as it has a direct link to the performance of products and systems, and thus has a direct relationship with the quality of life and thus sustainability in our societies. Emergence and system thinking are closely related to engineering design methodologies. In our paper, we develop a more precise definition of emergence through the core principles of systems complementarity that are similarity, irreducibility and sophisticated relationships expressed through the interfaces between systems, subsystems or product components.

We demonstrate the utility of the approach based on an aircraft pylon case study by presenting a detailed definition of an interface design matrix and analyse how pylon subsystems influence emergence. The results have shown that the product can be perfectly represented by a model-based approach supporting interface management and the assessment of system complementarity. In turn, this approach allows to go beyond a qualitative definition of emergence, as it proposes a quantitative approach through the assessment of complementarity.

The objective evaluation of empirical studies is an important part when assessing demand and validating design methods. However, metrics that can also map cognitive processes during design are still lacking. In order to address this problem, an online study with 12 participants was conducted. The aim of this investigation was to find a relation between cognitive load and performance in engineering design tasks. To assess the cognitive load, the NASA-RTLX questionnaire was used as an established measurement tool and was related to the results achieved by the participants. The results show that there is a correlation between the two investigated parameters. Based on a statistical analysis a correlation between increasing cognitive load and a decrease in performance could be identified. The tasks used produce comparable results to other studies investigating cognitive load, but the task causing the highest cognitive load shows the widest scatter in performance. The u-curve as suggested by the state of the art was not visible in the study’s results, but the cognitive load should be nevertheless used for studies of design processes, because it may reveal a need for methodical support.

Polygon meshes and particularly triangulated meshes can be used to describe the shape of different types of geometry such as bicycles, bridges, or runways. In engineering, such polygon meshes can occur as finite element meshes, resulting from topology optimization or laser scanning. This article presents an automated parameterization of polygon meshes into a parametric representation using subdivision surfaces, especially in topology optimization. Therefore, we perform surface skeletonization on a volumetric grid supported by the Euclidian distance transformation and topology preserving and shape-preserving criterion. Based on that surface skeleton, an automated conversation into a Subdivision Surface Control grid is established. The final mid-surface-like parametrization is quite flexible and can be changed by variating the control gird or the local thickness.

Using applications to change behaviors is a popular trend in recent years as mobiles are the easiest recording medium for users. However, few users can keep the behavior change for a long time. The aim of this study is to investigate motivations of keeping an application-tracked behavior change to provide effective and promote effective and targeted suggestions for application-tracked behavior intervention design practitioners and researchers. A 28-day self-report experiment and following “focus group” discussion have been conducted to detect the possible motivations. The results indicated 8 motivations which can affect maintaining behavior change: cooperation, competition, award, reminder and alarm, trust and willingness, relation with disease information and unplanned events. In addition, the results explore some motivations from negative data in applications or the cheating for good performance data behavior. At the same time, the study suggested the functions needed in future behavior change applications.

The paper studies what kind of support could be applied to the management of partly configurable modular systems. The main tasks of product management, product portfolio management and product variety management are defined. In addition, a partly configurable product structure and modular system are defined. Because the limited support in the literature for managing partly configurable modular systems, the article reviews previous product development cases in which authors have been involved on lessons learnt basis, i.e., if the methods and tools used in the cases could provide support for the research objective. As a result, the existing definition of the modular system should be extended by the concepts of non-module and design decision sequence description when dealing with partly configurable modular systems. This is because engineer-to-order should be made possible in cases where it brings clear added value to the customer compared to completely pre-defined solutions that may limit the customer's interest in the offering. Tools to assess the impact of changes to the product offering are required. These should be taken into account in frameworks that are used in method and tool development.

Design for Sustainability is a research area based on a multidisciplinary approach, which has become increasingly important in recent years. Great attention is paid to the design of products that can impact on users' behaviours, through embedded smart technologies, e.g. Internet of Things (IoT). In fact, IoT systems are able to “dialogue” with the users, supporting the identification of any misbehaviour, and suggesting more sustainable ones.

This paper presents a research aiming at supporting users towards more conscious food consumption in their daily life to reduce food waste. As a case study, it has been developed an interactive system in which chicken eggs are used as main communication element. Indeed, the environmental footprint of the egg industry is very heavy, and eggs are one of the main wasted food. The interactive system consists of a physical product, an eggs tray, integrating sensors and actuators for handling the interaction with users. It is accompanied by an interactive application for monitoring eggs consumption, displaying eggs waste statistics, and an Augmented Reality part for children, aimed to improve their awareness about food waste and the impact on their food habits through an “edutainment” approach.