In today’s market, competition is driving companies to force themselves to constantly improve. New challenges due to higher competition force engineering companies to reduce costs, increase their efficiency and decrease time to market. Lean Product Development, involving powerful methodologies and tools to maximize customer value and eliminate waste, is being popularised. This Master’s thesis aims to analyse the possibilities of Lean Product Development in project orientated engineering companies. Semcon is a global technology company offering engineering services and product information. It strives to undertake more in-house projects and become a project delivery. A study was conducted investigating how Semcon and its division TDO can improve its in-house projects from a resource and time perspective based on Lean Product Development. Furthermore, it investigates how Lean Product Development can be introduced at Semcon and during what restrictions. To achieve a deeper understanding of the methodologies and its possibilities at Semcon, benchmarking was conducted at Autoliv, Saab EDS and Scania, companies that successfully have initiated Lean transformation in their PD processes. The study reaches the conclusion that by working with continuous improvement, great potential exists for Semcon to improve its organisation. No systematic approach for utilising new ideas exists today and improvements need to be better spread and standardised in the company. Benchmarking companies have shown remarkable results working with this methodology and by introducing it at Semcon, it should provide great possibilities. Furthermore, the study shows that TDO’s ambition is to add much value in the earlier phases of product development. According to TDO’s management as well as research within the field, these phases are where most costumer value is created. By working with even more front-loaded product development, utilising a broader design space, TDO will gain advantages such as closer customer interaction and more successful results. Set-based design is a methodology recommended for TDO to avoid long iterative loops. When investigating what limitations exist when trying to combine XLPM, Semcon’s project model, and Lean Product Development, no great obstacles are observed. In XLPM, the first tollgates are to be postponed in comparison to traditional product development, to better suit front-loaded product development. The benchmarking companies are working with similar stage-gate project models, and have with satisfying results managed to combine it with Lean Product Development. The study reaches the conclusion that by creating a visual organisation, using a so-called Obeya room, the best possibilities for introducing Lean Product Development at Semcon will occur. A larger transparency between projects and more spreading of knowledge is requested by Semcon consultants, which a visual organisation provides. An action plan for an Obeya room is presented involving tools that support essential Lean methodologies that are important for TDO, such as continuous improvement, standardisations and knowledge flow. Visual tools supporting the possibilities to conduct parallel projects and handle resources more efficient are presented. TDO is recommended to initiate its Lean journey with an Obeya room.

For many products, the design process is a complex system involving the interaction of many distributed design activities that need to be carefully coordinated. This research develops a new tool, called a Bayesian network classifier, to improve one specific aspect of this challenge: quantitatively capturing a consensus of which designs are feasible options for meeting system-wide engineering requirements. Classifiers enable designers to independently develop and share maps of the feasible regions of their design space, enabling set-based collaborative design. The method is set-based in that resources are used to thoroughly understand design tradeoffs before commitment is made to a final design. The method is collaborative because the maps are coordinated between design teams to represent the mutually feasible design space of all stake-holders. The benefits are a more thorough understanding of the system-wide design problem across team boundaries as well as knowledge capture for future re-use, potentially leading to faster product development and higher quality products. / text

I takt med att världen förändras i varje hörn, från teknikindustrin och medicinindustrin till klimatförändringar, så förändras snabbmats industrin och människornas sätt att konsumera snabbmat. Och I takt med att den temperaturen stiger överallt i världen, nordpolen och sydpolen smälter, så ökar risken för försumning och utspädningen av den kött och kycklingberikade globala snabbmats industrin. Vilket i sin tur ge upphov till efterfrågan på alternativa lösningar till köttberikade snabbmat för att kunna lösa den krisen som snabbmats industrin står inför. Happy Pepper’s är en snabbmats restaurangkoncept som serverar endast hälsosamt och goda vegetariska wraps, juice och smoothies. Visionen med konceptet är att Happy Pepper’s skall vara en plats där samtliga snabb-mats älskare känner sig hemma, där de känner sig hörda, där de känner sig uppskattade och där de känner sig välkomna. Happy Pepper’s skall vara en plats där alla familjer kan samlas och umgås. Happy Pepper’s mål är att vara en globalt ledande aktör inom det vegetariska snabb-mats industrin.

The presented thesis describes the development of an automation design procedure for structural design of concrete slab bridges and how it can be used to conduct a set-based structural design. The automation procedure integrated finite element modelling, analysis and structural related verification (verifications in geometry, ULS and SLS) together and realised automatic implementation of the two processes. By employing the automation design procedure and the set-based design methodology, a case study is performed based on an existed bridge. In contrast with a traditional point-based design process, the set-based structural design considers a wide range of possible design solutions, called design space, which are combinations of possible choices of different design parameters. In the case study, the design parameters like structural dimensions and reinforcement layout are considered and constitutes the design space. The design space is first narrowed by structural related constraints and further narrowed by multiple criteria which are material cost, material mass and global warming impact (equivalent CO2 emission) until reaching an optimal solution considering the three criteria. The results of the case study reveal the potential of set-based design by using the automation design procedure in obtaining optimal design solutions on the three mentioned criteria. Meanwhile, a rough time estimation shows the automatic procedure helps improve the design efficiency. It also suggests that the evaluation and decision of the finally chosen solution should be the trade-offs between material cost and environmental impact.

This thesis describes an adaptable component level machinery system weight and size estimation tool used in the context of a ship distributed system architecture framework and ship synthesis model for naval ship concept design. The system architecture framework decomposes the system of systems into three intersecting architectures: physical, logical, and operational to describe the spatial and functional relationships of the system together with their temporal behavior characteristics. Following an Architecture Flow Optimization (AFO), or energy flow analysis based on this framework, vital components are sized based on their energy flow requirements for application in the ship synthesis model (SSM). Previously, components were sized manually or parametrically. This was not workable for assessing many designs in concept exploration and outdated parametric models based on historical data were not sufficiently applicable to new ship designs. The new methodology presented in this thesis uses the energy flow analysis, baseline component data, and physical limitations to individually calculate sizes and weights for each vital component in a ship power and energy system. The methodology allows for new technologies to be quickly and accurately implemented to assess their overall impact on the design. The optimized flow analysis combined with the component level data creates a higher fidelity design that can be analyzed to assess the impact of various systems and operational cases on the overall design. This thesis describes the SSM, discusses the AFO's contribution, and provides background on the component sizing methodology including the underlying theory, baseline data, energy conversion, and physical assumptions. / Master of Science / This thesis describes an adaptable component level machinery system weight and size estimation tool used in the context of a preliminary ship system design and naval ship concept design. The system design decomposes the system of systems into three intersecting areas: physical, logical, and operational to describe the spatial and functional relationships of the system together with their time dependent behavior characteristics. Following an Architecture Flow Optimization (AFO), or energy flow analysis based on this system design, vital components are sized based on their energy flow requirements for application in the ship synthesis model (SSM). Previously, components were sized manually or with estimated equations. This was not workable for assessing many designs in concept exploration and outdated equation models based on historical data were not sufficiently applicable to new ship designs. The new methodology presented in this thesis uses the energy flow analysis, baseline component data, and physical limitations to individually calculate sizes and weights for each vital component in a ship power and energy system. The methodology allows for new technologies to be quickly and accurately implemented to assess their overall impact on the design. The optimized flow analysis combined with the component level data creates a more accurate design that can be analyzed to assess the impact of various systems and operational cases on the overall design. This thesis describes the SSM, discusses the AFO’s contribution, and provides background on the component sizing methodology including the underlying theory, baseline data, energy conversion, and physical assumptions.

This thesis demonstrates that a parametrically-modifiable Advanced Marine Vehicle Structural (AMVS) module (that can be integrated into a larger framework of marine vehicle analysis modules) enables stakeholders, as a group, to complete structurally feasible ship designs using the Set-Based Design (SBD) method. The SBD method allows stakeholders to identify and explore multiple solutions to stakeholder requirements and only eliminating the infeasible poorer solutions after all solutions are completely explored. SBD offers the and advantage over traditional design methods such as Waterfall and Spiral because traditional methods do not adequately explore the design space to determine if they are eliminating more optimal solutions in terms of cost, risk and performance. The fundamental focus for this thesis was on the development of a parametrically modifiable AMVS module using a low-fidelity structural analysis method implemented using a numerical 2D Finite Element Analysis (FEA) applied to the HY2-SWATH. To verify the AMVS module accuracy, a high-fidelity structural analysis was implemented in MAESTRO to analyze the reference marine vehicle model and provide a comparison baseline. To explore the design space, the AMVS module is written to be parametrically modified through input variables, effectively generating a new vessel structure when an input is changed. AMVS module is used to analyze an advanced marine vessel in its two operating modes: displacement and foil-borne. AMVS demonstrates the capability to explore the design space and evaluate the structural feasibility of the advance marine vehicle designs through consideration of the material, stiffener/girder dimensions, stiffener/girder arrangement, and machinery/equipment weights onboard. / Master of Science

During product development, most of the customer value, as well as the cost and the quality of a product are defined. This key role of development in industry has led to an intense search for better ways to develop products, software, services and systems. One development methodology that has received positive attention is Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE). Some authors claim that SBCE and related practices from Lean Development are four times more productive than traditional development models. Unfortunately, SBCE is also described as hard to implement. This thesis presents the results of a three year research project aimed at implementing and describing the effects of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering in industry. The scope of the research is to use the principles of SBCE as a means to improve the productivity of industrial product development processes and its resulting products. The contribution of this work is a better understanding of Set-Based Concurrent Engineering and a support to implement its principles. The results show that SBCE gives positive effects on many aspects of product development performance and on the resulting products. The improvements are especially dominant on product performance, product cost and the level of innovation Moreover, a comparison between a Set-based decision process and a traditional matrix for design evaluation is presented, showing that these two approaches generate different results. The matrix evaluation promoted the development of new technology and the Set-based process promoted a thorough understanding of the important design parameters of the current designs. Finally, this work presents a structured design process and computer tool for implementing the principles of SBCE. The process was demonstrated by using information from an industrial development project, showing how the proposed process could implement the three principles of SBCE in a traditional Point-based development environment.