Product development is affected by uncertainties due to changing customer requirements, changing regulations, technological developments, long lead times, high product complexities, and geopolitical issues. Automation, increased flexibility of production, and reduced lead times are drivers that allow product development to be competitive in this scenario. Design engineers should be aware of production capabilities to facilitate early producibility assessments and to avoid late changes. Production preparation is identified as an important activity in the product development process, whereby the producibility of a product is assessed. In this thesis, the current state of production preparation during product development is investigated and a method is introduced supporting production preparation using production requirements. The work was carried out using the design research methodology framework and comprised four studies based on the four steps of the framework. The research clarification and descriptive study 1 phases aimed at developing understanding and were done by means of data collection at the companies through interviews and document studies. The next two steps were prescriptive study and descriptive study 2, which aimed at developing and evaluating the support. This was done through observation, workshops, and solution development. The production preparation process is supported by Design for Manufacturing and Assembly, failure mode and effects analysis, lesson-learnt documents, and computer-aided design, and the efficiency of the process is dependent on individual skills and knowledge. Tools to support common understanding, remove ambiguity in requirements, and enable collaboration between design and production engineers are needed. The developed method allows for the identification, definition, structuring, and sharing of production requirements, aligning with varying maturities of product and production systems during product development. This helps improve the collaboration between design and production engineers for production preparation.

This thesis is a continuation of design automation studies within research projects financed by VINNOVA (the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems) and Knowledge foundation that contributed to the development of producibility assessment system at a global aerospace products supplier, GKN Aerospace Sweden. A case study was carried at the company on Turbine Rear Structure (TRS) component design of a jet engine with the main objective to evaluate weld producibility assessment tools and to demonstrate system’s performance in multi-disciplinary design environment. The context of this thesis is a set-based product design development where several studies, i.e. thermal, structural, aerodynamic etc. are carried concurrently to gather knowledge between their parameter relations. The thesis contributes to the goal of fully integrated producibility assessment in multi-disciplinary studies to support product development process. The problems encountered during the thesis execution involved systematic analysis setup to extract and verify CAD geometry data, assessment of meaningfulness of producibility indicators, development of semi-automated data post-processing module and relating product design to its manufacturing aspects. Commercial and in-house developed software were used extensively to demonstrate the results of the system with the help of continuous company support to mitigate indispensable bottlenecks along the way. The work has led to systematic improvements, determined assessment limitations and most relevant weld producibility aspects. Collected feedback to evaluate prepared demonstrator showed promising results to support product design decisions considering both performance and producibility.