This paper provides a review of papers published in the Journal of Engineering Design from 2007 to 2008 Included are the different perspectives on key challenges existing within, and state-of-the-art technologies developed as solutions to current design issues The intention of this paper is not to provide detailed coverage of all the papers published over the last two years, but rather to provide an overview of research efforts focusing upon key research streams and to illustrate trends within design research and practice

Engineering design: perspectives, challenges, and recent advances

Product platform modular architecture identification is the most critical process to support the incremental design of derivative instances In order to solve the inflexibility in a single modular or scalable platform of complex mechatronics products, an integrated product modularisation scheme based on flow analysis, design structure matrix (DSM) and fuzzy clustering is proposed to compose a flexible platform The definition of flexible platform is explained and internal mappings among functions, components and modules are set up DSM for a kernel product is constructed by the flow analysis between the leaf components in design bill of material An improved scaling by minimising a convex function algorithm is developed to transform the DSM to vectors in two-dimensional spaces, and the vectors are clustered using the traditional fuzzy c-means algorithm Cluster centre components are selected to identify modular types with respective functional features Thus, the internal relationships between components 

An integrated method for flexible platform modular architecture design

Technology and Global Industry: Companies and Nations in the World Economy

Product configuration is one of the key technologies in the environment of mass customisation, and it has been emphasised and concerned by much research. However, previous studies mostly focus on the cost or the customer utility, but ignore the environmental concern which becomes an important design criterion due to the rising awareness of environmental protection. Moreover, various preferences of customers are also not considered. In this paper, we develop a new bi-objective optimisation model with simultaneous consideration of customer satisfaction and the environmental impact in product configuration. Two objectives of our model are the customer satisfaction index (CSI) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of products. The CSI is presented for the evaluation of customer satisfaction and the GHG emission model is developed to assess the environmental impact of the product. Essential constraints, such as selection, cost and compatibility, are also considered in the model. In addition, a two-phase approach ...

Optimisation of product configuration in consideration of customer satisfaction and low carbon

The automation of transportation in the production, trade and service sector is a key point in the optimization of logistics. Automated Guided Vehicle Systems (AGVS) provide several benefits to fulfill this task. This paper provides an overview on AGVS technology, points out recent technological developments and describes results of research performed by the Department Planning and Controlling of Warehouse and Transport Systems (PSLT) e.g. statistical analyses, characteristic curves and new approaches.

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Automated Guided Vehicle Systems: a Driver for Increased Business Performance

The automation of transportation in the production, trade and service sectors is a key point in the optimisation of intralogistics. For this task, Automated Guided Vehicle Systems (AGVS) provide special benefits. Applications exist in all fields of industry and trade. Typical examples are the use in assembly lines, warehouses, order picking systems and production plants. Based on the AGVS-Statistic Europe, which is created and administrated by the Department of Planning and Controlling of Warehouse and Transport Systems of the University of Hannover, the main application of AGVS and the sectors in which they are used are analysed. Furthermore, this paper discusses the development of AGVS in China. The first successful implementations as well as the future trends and possibilities are presented.

Worldwide development and application of automated guided vehicle systems

An increasing number of companies design a family of product variants simultaneously in order to introduce adequate product variety in the competitive market in a cost-effective way while shortening product lead-times, instead of designing one product at a time. The key to using this approach successfully is to achieve the right trade-off between product family commonality and performance of individual product variants. This paper considers multi-level commonality in product family design in the sense that the feature or component can be common only among some product variants. This differs from the two extremes of being totally common throughout the family or being completely different from one product variant to another. A product family design model is proposed as a multi-objective optimisation. A commonality index is introduced to evaluate the family commonality in the presence of multiple levels. A multi-objective genetic algorithm is developed for simultaneous design of a family of product variants....

Genetic algorithm-based optimisation method for product family design with multi-level commonality

Global markets and the increasing demand of customers for individual products lead to a steady rise of product variants. Especially high quality goods on highly competitive markets like automobiles must meet customer's demands. The opportunity to configure a car according to ones' preferences leads to an unmanageable number of variants. Manufacturers' strategies to handle this problem reduce the offered component-combinations, but barely succeed in reducing the production-complexity. The approach of the late product individualisation (LPI) meets this problem. The complexity of the production is reduced without limiting the customer's choice to a small number of variants. The production process is relieved from customisation activities while these operations are relocated to further processes of the supply chain. The approach of LPI will be described and how it causes new challenges for the supply chain. Analytic instruments are presented which help to detect reasonable components of a product that should be individualised.

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Lothar Schulze

Papers

Worldwide development and application of automated guided vehicle systems

Genetic algorithm-based optimisation method for product family design with multi-level commonality

Logistics management of late product individualisation - application in the automotive industry