Purpose – Agile manufacturing concept was first coined by Iacocca institute in 1991 as a new manufacturing paradigm in order to provide and ensure competitiveness in the emerging global manufacturing order. Afterward, a considerable number of studies have been conducted in this area. Reviewing these studies reveals that they mostly focus on agile manufacturing drivers, definition and characteristics but few of them propose practical solutions to achieve it. Moreover, among proposed approaches toward agility, the impact of product design has been less studied. However, the substantial impacts of product design on manufacturing firms are widely accepted. To fill this gap, this research aims to analyse how the product design affects the potential of being agile in a manufacturing firm. In this research the main focus is on the architecture of product as a part of its design. Methodology – Since this research requires synthesizing and bridging two separate fields, agile manufacturing and product architecture, the “literature review” method is adopted. Findings – Agile manufacturing has four main dimensions: drivers, capabilities, strategies and providers. To become an agile competitor, a manufacturing firm should concentrate on enriching a set of appropriate agility capabilities. Moreover, product architecture allocates functions to physical chunks (major building blocks of a product) and determines interfaces among chunks. The analysis of reviewed literature exhibits that product architecture has strong implications for agility capabilities. These implications might have both positive or negative effects which result in various trade-offs. Additionally, these trade-offs disclose this fact that there is not a superior architecture. Thus, a manufacturing firm is able to adopt suitable product architecture by considering the product architecture impacts on agility capabilities and related trade-offs. Value – This study organized and summarized a considerable number of researches’ outcomes in the product architecture area. In addition, it covers the lack of attention to product architecture in agile manufacturing literature. Also, it exhibits how product architecture may contribute to manufacturers which are moving toward agility. This report raises managers and practitioners’ awareness regarding product architecture potential and probable consequences of different choices that they make.

Yes / Product design decomposition and synthesis is a constant challenge with its continuously increasing complexity at each level of abstraction. Currently, design decomposition and synthesis analytical tasks are mostly accomplished via functional and structural methods. These methods are useful in different phases of design process for product definition and architecture but limited in a way that they tend to focus more on ‘what’ and less on ‘how’ and vice versa. This paper combines a functional representation tool known as System State Flow Diagram (a solution independent approach), a solution search tool referred as Morphology Table, and Design Structure Matrix (mainly a solution dependent tool). The proposed approach incorporates Multiple Domain Matrix (MDM) to integrate the knowledge of both solution independent and dependent analyses. The approach is illustrated with a case study of solar robot toy, followed by its limitations, future work and discussion.

There is a strong connection between a product’s architecture and the ease with which it can be evolved into future generations of products. The main goal of this dissertation is to create a measurement tool that can assess the extent to which a design exhibits different characteristics of being flexible for future evolution. The High Definition Design Structure Matrix (HDDSM) is presented as a product representation model that captures the specific types of interactions between components of a product. An interaction basis is defined that extends the detailed flows of signal, material, and energy used in functional modeling to include detailed spatial interactions. By including an external element to represent all interactions that cross outside of the product boundary, the HDDSM is shown to be a modular product model. A process for reverse engineering products and creating a HDDSM is presented and shown to significantly reduce the effort required to create a HDDSM model. The repeatability of the HDDSM model is evaluated by calculating the interrater agreement between models created by independent examiners. Four analysis processes are presented to analyze the HDDSM model for characteristics of evolvable design. These characteristics are taken from design guidelines for product flexibility for future evolution. The analyses produce quantitative metrics that allow an examiner to measure and compare how well a particular characteristic of evolvable design has been incorporated based only on the component interactions recorded in the HDDSM. Three of the metrics, the Space Potential Ratio, the Framework metric, and the Energy-Flow Module metric are shown to be consistent with a product’s flexibility for future evolution as measured by a Change Modes and Effects Analysis. / text

Aus der Einleitung: "Die Produktarchitektur ist ein Modell zur Abbildung der Verknüpfung zwischen funktionaler und physischer Sichtweise auf ein Produkt und Ausgangspunkt für eine Vielzahl von Methoden, u. a. zur Funktionsintegration oder Modularisierung. Die dabei adressierten Ziele der Produktentwicklung sind sehr unterschiedlich und fokussieren bspw. die Reduktion der Teilezahl und des Gesamtgewichts oder eine effiziente Variantenerzeugung durch Produktbaukästen. Der Lösungsraum bei der Produktarchitekturgestaltung wird maßgeblich durch bekannte und nutzbare Technologien und deren Restriktionen bestimmt. So geht die spanende Fertigung mit steigender geometrischer Komplexität der Bauteile oftmals mit einer erheblichen Kostensteigerung einher. Werkzeugerfordernde Fertigungstechnologien wie bspw. das Druckgießen sind in der Regel nur für größere Bauteilstückzahlen rentabel. Die Einführung additiver Fertigungsverfahren bietet neue Möglichkeiten zur Überwindung dieser Restriktionen und zur Realisierung zusätzlicher Freiheiten in Bezug auf die geometrische Gestaltung sowie Materialzusammensetzung bei der Produktarchitekturgestaltung. Während der Produktentwicklung werden die Potentiale additiver Fertigungsverfahren jedoch oft nicht umfassend berücksichtigt, wodurch besonders bei der Gestaltung der Produktarchitektur große Potentiale unerschlossen bleiben. Stattdessen erfolgt die Gestaltung der Produktarchitektur implizit und Möglichkeiten bspw. zur Funktionsintegration werden nur vereinzelt genutzt. Aus diesem Defizit leitet sich die zentrale Fragestellung dieses Beitrags ab: Wie können Potentiale additiver Fertigungsverfahren bei der Gestaltung der Produktarchitektur systematisch berücksichtigt werden? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage wird in Abschnitt 2 die Produktarchitekturgestaltung in den Produktentwicklungsprozess eingeordnet und aufgezeigt, wie verschiedene Zielstellungen einer Produktentwicklung durch sie adressiert werden können. Technologische Einflüsse auf die Produktarchitekturgestaltung werden in Abschnitt 3 am Beispiel von additiven Fertigungstechnologien erläutert, bevor in Abschnitt 4 ein methodisches Rahmenwerk vorgestellt wird, welches die Nutzung von Potentialen additiver Fertigungsverfahren durch die Bereitstellung von Prinzipien unterstützt. Die Anwendung des Rahmenwerks wird in Abschnitt 5 am Beispiel eines adaptiven Drehgelenks für Parallelroboter verdeutlicht.

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<div>The mirroring hypothesis states the organization architecture and the product architecture tend to “mirror” or mimic each other. There are two types of investigations into this phenomenon: descriptive and normative. Descriptive studies ask whether mirroring is present in an organization/product pair. Normative studies ask whether mirroring affects the performance of an organization/product pair. Much of the mirroring hypothesis literature claims to observe mirroring or claims mirroring improves the performance of the product. While there is still work to be done in the descriptive and normative realms of mirroring hypothesis research, there is a distinct gap in research investigating mirroring in the design phase of products and whether it can be used as a strategy during that phase. This work aims to demonstrate that differently mirrored organization/product pairs working the same example problem produce different design solutions. This demonstration leads into an investigation on where in the life cycle mirroring would be most useful as a design parameter when designing a product. The results of this thesis show that for this specific example problem, mirroring has an effect on the design solutions, and given a Department of Defense acquisition life cycle, there are opportunities where mirroring could be advantageous to use as a design strategy. This work challenges others interested in the topic to not just ask why does mirroring occur in design, but how can it be used to make the design better.</div>

Road transports face increasing societal challenges with respect to emissions, safety, and traffic congestion, as well as business challenges. Truck automation, e.g. self-driving trucks may be utilized to address some of these issues. Autonomous transport vehicles may be characterized as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). A drawback is that CPS significantly increase technical complexity and thus introduce new challenges to system architecting. A product architecture is the interrelation between physical components and their function, i.e. their purpose. Product architectures can be categorized as being modular or integral. The main purpose of a modular architecture is to enable external variety and at the same time internal commonality. Products with a modular architecture are configured from predesigned building blocks, i.e. modules. A stable module, which is a carrier of main function(s) has standardized interfaces, is configured for company-specific reasons, which means it supports a company-specific (business) strategy. In this thesis, the present state at the heavy vehicle manufacturer Scania, concerning product architecting, modularization, product description and configuration is investigated. Moreover, a new clustering based method for product modularization that integrates product complexity and company business strategies is proposed. The method is logically verified with multiple industrial cases, where the architecture of a heavy truck driveline is used as a test bench. The driveline contains synergistic configurations of mechanical, electrical and software technologies that are constituents of an automated  and/or semi-autonomous system, i.e. the driveline may be characterized as a CPS. The architecture is analyzed both from technical complexity and business strategy point of view.  The presented research indicates that a structured methodology which supports the development of the product architecture is needed at Scania, to enable control of the increasing technical complexity in the Cyber-Physical Systems. Finally, configuration rules are identified to be highly important in order to successfully realize a modular product architecture. A drawback with this approach is that the solution space becomes hard to identify, therefore a complete and flexible product description methodology is essential. The results from the case studies indicate that clustering of a Product Architecture DSM may result in a modular architecture with significantly reduced complexity, but with clusters that contain conflicting module drivers. It is also identified that the new modularization methodology is capable of identifying and proposing reasonable module candidates that address product complexity as well as company-specific strategies. Furthermore, several case studies show that the proposed method can be used for analyzing and finding the explicit and/or implicit, technical as well as strategic, reasons behind the architecture of an existing product.

Development of complex products and large systems is a highly interactive social process involving hundreds of people designing thousands of interrelated components and making millions of coupled decisions. Nevertheless, in the research summarized by this paper, we have created methods to study the development process, identify its underlying structures, and critique its operation. In this article, we introduce three views of product development complexity: a process view, a product view, and an organization view. We are able to learn about the complex social phenomenon of product development by studying the patterns of interaction across the decomposed elements within each view. We also compare the alignment of the interaction patterns between the product, process, and organization domains. We then propose metrics of product development complexity by studying and comparing these interaction patterns. Finally, we develop hypotheses regarding the patterns of product development interactions, which will be helpful to guide future research. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

In recent years, numerous methods to aid designers in conceptualizing new products have been developed. These methods intend to give structure to a process that was, at one time, considered to be a purely creative exercise. Resulting from the study, implementation, and refinement of design methodologies is the notion that both the structure of the development process and the structure of the developed product are key factors in creating value in a firm’s product line. With respect to the latter key factor, product architecture, but more specifically, modular product architecture has been the subject of much study. However, prior research in the area of modular product architecture has, with limited exception, focused on the construction of modules that are to be incorporated into a product before it becomes available to its end-users; that is, the modules are incorporated ‘pre-market.’ The research contained in this thesis is focused on two tasks: advancing the notion of a modular product architecture in which modules can be incorporated into a product ‘post-market,’ and creating a method that aids designers in synthesizing these post-market modules. Researchers have examined the idea of post-market modules; however, they do not fully formalize language used to describe these modules, and they also do not give the product space created by post-market modularization well-defined boundaries. Additionally, the prior work gives no method that can be used to create post-market modules. The research presented here addresses these shortcomings in the prior work by first, defining the terms ‘derivative product’ and ‘host product’ to describe the post-market module and the product that the module augments, respectively. Second, by establishing three guidelines that are used to assess the validity of potential derivative products, giving the newly termed host and derivative product space defined boundaries. And lastly, by developing a 7-step, biomimetic-based methodology that can be used to create derivative product concepts (post-market modules). This developed methodology is applied to four case studies in which it is used to create five derivative product concepts for a given host product. Thus, 20 derivative product concepts are developed in this study, demonstrating the qualitative effectiveness of the 7-step methodology.