Manufacturing companies have traditionally focused their design and development activities on realizing technical and engineered aspects of physical artifacts based on performance requirements. The ever-changing business climate, with its increased pace during the past decades, has forced industries to continuously innovate their approach toward the development of new products. Pressured also by global competition, manufacturing companies need to reconsider the traditional concept of realizing value via goods production, and shift towards realizing value through product-service combinations. Companies have begun to recognize that gaining competitive advantage and expanding market shares is not achievable purely through continuous technical improvements. Rather, it is necessary to develop a closer relationship to the customer to gain a deeper understanding of expectations, needs, and perceived value. From a development perspective, the overarching problem within complex systems such as those in which cars, aircraft, and excavators are manufactured, or healthcare is provided, is that the focus on customer value is likely to become blurred since it is difficult to understand the impact a change in any single component in the overall system has on value, and to determine a new function’s impact on future scenarios. The main goals of this thesis are to provide an understanding of key challenges when considering the value different design alternatives provide in the conceptual phases of product development taking the automotive industry as case study, and to explore how to support a multi-disciplinary design team in making value-conscious decisions when dealing with new product-service offerings. The research approach has involved data collection through participation in, and facilitation of, product-service design workshops in the automotive industry. Also, it has involved follow-up meetings and interviews, as well as a review of literature on state-of-the-art methods in early conceptual design phases, which describes the advantages and disadvantages of the different frameworks. The primary finding of the study is that determination of the impact of different PSS design options on customer value becomes more challenging since new elements are introduced (e.g., new business models and services). The design team requires more holistic competences in order to more fully understand changing contexts; and new methods and tools are needed in order to establish a base to define, discuss and assess what “uncontested customer value” is, and link it to the different product-service elements of the system. Secondly, this thesis proposes a conceptual approach for value simulation and assessment of different design options, where the iterative use of personas and scenario generation is combined with value modeling and computer-based simulation techniques, enabling a quick “what-if” analysis of the various options, facilitating the identification of promising combinations of product and service elements that provide higher customer value.

This master's thesis is focused on conceptual design of glider with electric propulsion system following the CS-22 regulation. Statistical analysis of the glider with an auxiliary electric engine has been carried out in order to determine basic design parameters for conceptual design. Based on analytical drag polar, the flight performance parameters are calculated, in particular flight range and influence of the solar panels on the flight range. This thesis also includes preliminary design solution of accumulator placement within the wing.

This master thesis covers conceptual design of haptic feedback system and safety and reliability assessment. System is developed for aircraft categories UL2, EASA CS-LSA, EASA CS-VLA and EASA-CS-23. Conceptual design is divided into three parts. First is aimed on haptic system test with simulator. Second is conceptual design of haptic system for in-flight test. Third part contains safety and reliability assessment and summarizes problems of haptic system installation in real aircraft.

This thesis deals with a conceptual design of small utility vehicle with three axles. The aim is to devise a suitable type of frame along with construction of all axles and a steering system, implementation of a drive train, a braking system and other basic equipment. Own solution is preceded by elaboration of a survey dealing with small utility vehicles produced nowadays as well as in the past together with a description of all variants of basic assemblies suitable for the construction of the specified vehicle.

This master thesis solves conceptual design of aerotow airplane and airplane for basic aerobatics. Airplane is designed by using of specification CS-23. The first part of the thesis solves conceptual design. Especially possible concepts and choice the best one according to requests. Next part deals with flight performance of aerotow airplane in normal flight and also in aerobatics. The third part is engaged in main flight performance in aerotow. 3D system model of whole aircraft and compact disk with mentioned 3D model and electronic version of thesis is also added.

The primary objective of wastewater treatment is the removal of pollutants to meet given legal effluent standards. To further reduce operators costs additional recovery of resources and energy is desired by industrial and municipal wastewater treatment. Hence the objective in early stage of planning of treatment facilities lies in the identification and evaluation of promising configurations of treatment units. Obviously this early stage of planning may best be supported by software tools to be able to deal with a variety of different treatment configurations. In chemical process engineering various design tools are available that automatically identify feasible process configurations for the purpose to obtain desired products from given educts. In contrast, the adaptation of these design tools for the automatic generation of treatment unit configurations (process chains) to achieve preset effluent standards is hampered by the following three reasons. First, pollutants in wastewater are usually not defined as chemical substances but by compound parameters according to equal properties (e.g. all particulate matter). Consequently the variation of a single compound parameter leads to a change of related parameters (e.g. relation between Chemical Oxygen Demand and Total Suspended Solids). Furthermore, mathematical process models of treatment processes are tailored towards fractions of compound parameters. This hampers the generic representation of these process models which in turn is essential for automatic identification of treatment configurations. Second, treatment technologies for wastewater treatment rely on a variety of chemical, biological, and physical phenomena. Approaches to mathematically describe these phenomena cover a wide range of modeling techniques including stochastic, conceptual or deterministic approaches. Even more the consideration of temporal and spatial resolutions differ. This again hampers a generic representation of process models. Third, the automatic identification of treatment configurations may either be achieved by the use of design rules or by permutation of all possible combinations of units stored within a database of treatment units. The first approach depends on past experience translated into design rules. Hence, no innovative new treatment configurations can be identified. The second approach to identify all possible configurations collapses by extremely high numbers of treatment configurations that cannot be mastered. This is due to the phenomena of combinatorial explosion. It follows therefrom that an appropriate planning algorithm should function without the need of additional design rules and should be able to identify directly feasible configurations while discarding those impractical. This work presents a planning tool for the identification and evaluation of treatment configurations that tackles the before addressed problems. The planning tool comprises two major parts. An external declarative knowledge base and the actual planning tool that includes a goal oriented planning algorithm. The knowledge base describes parameters for wastewater characterization (i.e. material model) and a set of treatment units represented by process models (i.e. process model). The formalization of the knowledge base is achieved by the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The developed data model being the organization structure of the knowledge base describes relations between wastewater parameters and process models to enable for generic representation of process models. Through these parameters for wastewater characterization as well as treatment units can be altered or added to the knowledge base without the requirement to synchronize already included parameter representations or process models. Furthermore the knowledge base describes relations between parameters and properties of water constituents. This allows to track changes of all wastewater parameters which result from modeling of removal efficiency of applied treatment units. So far two generic treatment units have been represented within the knowledge base. These are separation and conversion units. These two raw types have been applied to represent different types of clarifiers and biological treatment units. The developed planning algorithm is based on a Means-Ends Analysis (MEA). This is a goal oriented search algorithm that posts goals from wastewater state and limit value restrictions to select those treatment units only that are likely to solve the treatment problem. Regarding this, all treatment units are qualified according to postconditions that describe the effect of each unit. In addition, units are also characterized by preconditions that state the application range of each unit. The developed planning algorithm furthermore allows for the identification of simple cycles to account for moving bed reactor systems (e.g. functional unit of aeration tank and clarifier). The evaluation of identified treatment configurations is achieved by total estimated cost of each configuration. The planning tool has been tested on five use cases. Some use cases contained multiple sources and sinks. This showed the possibility to identify water reuse capabilities as well as to identify solutions that go beyond end of pipe solutions. Beyond the originated area of application, the planning tool may be used for advanced interrogations. Thereby the knowledge base and planning algorithm may be further developed to address the objectives to identify configurations for any type of material and energy recovery.

Didactic proposals on modelling in mathematics education mostly give priority to models which describe, explain as well as partially forecast and provide mathematical solutions to real situations. A view of the modelling concept of informatics, which also initiates rapidly generalised deliberations of models, can also make a contribution to the spectrum of models, which are treated in a meaningful sense in mathematics lessons so as to expand some interesting aspects. In this paper, this is illustrated by means of conceptual design models – and, here, especially of process models – using the example of elevator organisation in a multi-storey construction.

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Design decisions have a large impact early in the design process. Optimization methods can help engineers improve their early decision making, however, design problems are often ill-posed for optimization at this early stage. This thesis develops engineering methods to use optimization during embodiment design, despite these difficulties. One common difficulty in designing mechanical systems is in handling the effects that design changes in one subsystem have on another. This is made more difficult in early engineering design, when design information is preliminary. Increased efforts have been made to use numerical optimization methods in early engineering design – because of the large impact early decisions have on subsequent development activities. One step toward executing meaningful optimizations in early design is the development of an optimization framework to be used when conditions are expected to change as the design progresses and new information is gained. This thesis presents a design framework that considers such change by subjecting the parametric updating of CAD models to optimization criteria specific to the problem at hand. Under the proposed framework, a part or subassembly is parametrically modeled in CAD; when changes are made to the subsystems that interact with the part or subassembly, it is then updated subject to design objectives and constraints. In this way, the updated part or subassembly satisfies system and subsystem level optimization criteria, reducing the need for the designer to react to design changes manually. It is used to reduce the weight of a Formula SAE suspension rocker by 18%, demonstrating the utility of this framework. Next, we develop methods to help engineers by giving them options and helping them explore during configuration generation. The design of multiple-bend, progressive-die-formed springs typically comprises four steps: (i) functional specification, (ii) configuration generation, (iii) configuration selection, and (iv) detailed shape and size optimization. Configuration generation fundamentally affects the success or failure of the design effort. This presents an important problem: by not generating potentially optimal configurations for further development in detailed design, the designer may unknowingly set the design on track for sub-optimal performance. In response, a method is developed that improves configuration generation. Specifically, an optimization-based spring configuration generator – without which, the generation would typically be based solely on designer creativity, experience, and knowledge. The proposed approach allows the designer to explore numerous optimization-generated spring configurations, which feasibly satisfy the functional specifications. The feasibility study is carried out before a final configuration is chosen for detailed development. Thus streamlining the designer's efforts to develop a design that avoids sub-optimality. We use the feasibleconfiguration generator to identify twenty-two electrical contact spring configurations. All twenty-two of the configurations satisfy the design's functional specifications. Two important concepts that improve decision making in early design were chosen. First, is the concept of a paremetric CAD based framework. Second is the concept of generating iso-performing design solutions. A numerical computer-based application is explained that takes advantage of these two ideas. A genetic algorithm topology optimization framework with the ability to converge to iso-performing solutions was integrated with CATIA V5. This application is demonstrated on a Formula SAE frame where it develops a pareto frontier of designs, expands upon one compromise design by producing iso-performing solutions, and automatically produces designs with the same performance after a parametric suspension change.

In this thesis I have analyzed how the phenomenon level of contrast, a consequence of the relation between level of light and distribution of light, works within urban green areas. For this particular site, the too high level of contrast is a result of the high level of light distributed 1) in the direction of oncoming pedestrians and 2) in a single zone of light and 3) on a too condensed surface area and 4) in a space with multiple vertical elements (in a dark space with low reflectance values). Being in the only lighted area surrounded by trees (vertical elements absorbing or reflecting light), with eyes adapted to its level of light, consequently, makes it impossible to see beyond the path. This since our eyes always adapt to the brightest spot in our field of view, which in all directions is a spot very close to the user. And since adapting to the emitted and reflected light our eyes cannot also adapt to the darkness beyond this enclosed space. Another perspective on this, also related to the very basics of our vision has to do with the task oriented lighting solutions. We humans have two different types of vision - central and peripheral. The central vision is approximately 2% of our field of view, it is the small spot where our gaze focus, the rest is peripheral vision. The strange thing is that modern urban lighting design have focused almost solely on task lighting and the central vision, and left the peripheral vision literally disorientated. Because, in order for the peripheral vision to help us navigate and collect spatial information, it needs variable lightning with multiple zones of light, creating differences in shade, revealing form and depth. The main contribution of this thesis, beyond defining knowledge regarding how light acts in these specific situations, is the development of a lighting design method specifically for urban green areas from a practice based design perspective (see figure 16). And that I have started the work of creating practical knowledge and answers to the question: How can the method be used in practice?