Ebook: 20th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering

Dear CE2013 delegates,

It is our pleasure to present to you the proceedings of the 20th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering. We are delighted that the International Society for Product Enhancement (ISPE) has chosen Melbourne as the venue for their anniversary conference. This is the first time the conference is held in Australia and we hope that you will find the time also to explore the sights of our beautiful city, state and country.

Concurrent Engineering (CE), as a concept, initiates processes with the goal to improve product quality, production efficiency and overall customer satisfaction. The definition of a product has evolved from manufacturing and supplying goods only, to providing goods with added value, to eventually promoting a complete service business solution with support from introduction into service, operations to decommissioning. Services are becoming increasingly important to the economy: the service industry has grown significantly, and even companies that fall outside the traditional service industry are more and more reliant on service-based business. For example, in Japan, USA, Germany and Russia more than 60% of the GDP is due to service-based activities.

The 20th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering will carry the theme Product and Service Engineering in a Dynamic World. This theme was chosen to celebrate the first students graduating from the new Master of Engineering (System Support Engineering) (MSSE) at RMIT University. This programme was a response to a requirement for an educational programme specifically focused on training industry leaders in the design and implementation of support solutions for complex engineering systems, as organisations are becoming increasingly sophisticated, performance-based and cost competitive. The Master degree was developed in cooperation with industry partners.

We are looking forward to hearing about new developments and insights in the various sessions including service engineering, cloud computing and digital manufacturing, knowledge-based engineering and sustainability in concurrent engineering.

Again, welcome to Melbourne and we wish you an inspiring conference and a wonderful stay in Australia.

Cees Bil

John Mo

Conference Chairmen

Modern refineries are complex, very high in value and production. They are expected to function for years to come, with ability to handle the change in technology and feed quality. The aging of a refinery and continues increase of vendors and contractors numbers forces the refinery's operation management to design a support system which can capture these changes. Furthermore, an accurate performance measurement and risk evaluation processes are highly needed. Therefore, this paper explores the nature of the support system design for a refinery. The research work explores the operation support system from a range of perspectives, interviewing managers from across the refinery organization. The factors contributing to complexity of a support system are described in context is presented which clusters them into several key areas. It is proposed that this framework may then be used as a tool for analysis and management of support system. The paper will conclude with discussion of potential application of the framework and opportunities for future work.

Aircraft design is a compromise of many different disciplines. Yet the history books are littered with projects that failed because something was overlooked in the early design stages that have come back to haunt it in the latter stages. This is very evident when it comes to evaluation of flying qualities and aircraft behavior as this is almost left out of the overall picture in the early design phases. It has long been considered that first order approximations are sufficient to indicate any issues in the early stages of design, but these can only show so much and are built on simplifications and approximations of a standard set of modes of motion. As airframes move away from classical designs due to improved materials, advanced manufacturing techniques evolve, or the improved efficiency associated with unconventional designs, so the approximations break down further. At this point it becomes prudent to perform more detailed assessment earlier in the project lifecycle. However, this too can have issues as it may be viewed that there is insufficient data, or the airframe is too complex to build a mathematical model. Then there is the question as to what to test and as such 6-DoF flight modeling is left until later in the process. This can have obvious consequences further down the project as 80% of the project and lifecycle costs are committed in the first 20% of the design. This immediately identifies that more effort should be put in the initial 20% to evaluate the complete design including flight modeling.

All the problems and issues that are presented above are now solvable through modern modeling techniques and software tools. This paper describes the tools developed to integrate flight simulation early on in the design process. Aerodynamics, stability and control estimates from the Advanced Aircraft Analysis software are corrected with the use of wind tunnel data, wind tunnel data is scaled to full size airplane and actual flight conditions. This data is then fed into the J2 Universal Toolkit to actually fly the airplane. Quality 6-DoF models can be built with minimal data and relative ease allowing engineers to start to look at running detailed analyses across multiple ideas and options very quickly and much earlier in the design process combining the more detailed handling qualities assessment with the aerodynamic evaluation, performance, propulsion and weight calculations right from the beginning of the design. Each point in the regulations has a configuration and maneuver associated with proofing compliance, these configurations and maneuvers can be set up in the modeling tool and all ideas and options can be evaluated. This very quickly identifies areas where the aircraft cannot get certified, and these ideas can then either be eliminated or modified. By following an integrated approach and implementing full 6-DoF flight modeling from the early stages of the design using simple methods initially, looking at sensitivity studies and the impact of tolerances throughout the process, and flying the complete certification envelope throughout the design provides a truly concurrent engineering approach to the design as all other disciplines feed into and have an impact on the behavior and flying qualities. This method allows more ideas to be evaluated earlier, enables the impact of changes to be tracked, and ensures that no surprises remain by the time the first flight comes around. This can reduce timescales, reduce the amount and cost of re-work to fix issues following flight test, and result in a better all-round design.

The paper shows the tools developed, the processes followed and an example airplane design using these tools.

Due to distributed development of complex technical systems like machine tools, different system components are modeled and simulated in independent program suits. Several standards specify exchange of model data, but communication during concurrent simulations is not standardized yet. Therefore, the SimBus (Simulation Bus) was developed to close this gap. This novel software architecture allows flexible coupling and implementation of existing simulation software suits.

This paper explores project management techniques that can support the development of novel product-service systems. Some observations from the development of an airborne earth properties measurement system are provided. The intellectual property and the data this system could potentially deliver was more important than the potential commercial value of the product itself. What was sought was a complete business service solution. A concurrent engineering approach was implemented linking both product development and survey data/analysis services. The blend of product and service was integrated using a function modeling technique. It was observed that the implementation of some functions required radical innovation whilst others could be implemented through incremental improvements to current practice. It is suggested in the paper that adapting production learning curve concepts that reflect the relative degrees of uncertainty involved in individual subsystems can enhance project management forecasting practice

Software Engineering must face the new challenges imposed by the Cloud Computing paradigm. New methodologies for software development must be proposed. For this purpose, this paper presents a specific methodology for collaborative software development in the Cloud, and then describes the architecture of Automatic Software Development as a Service (ASDaaS). The goal of ASDaaS is to popularize software development in the Cloud and make it accessible to non-IT professionals. In fact, with Cloud Computing and the convergence toward “Everything as a Service”, we no longer consider the classical context of software development, where IT teams or integrators are solicited to perform software development. ASDaaS allows a stakeholder, without computer skills to perform automatic developments from functional requirements, SLA (Service Level Agreement) requirements, and business rules definition. ASDaaS promotes the discovery and composition of web services. It is itself composed of a set of services which can carry out and cover the whole process of software development. ASDaaS also allows the automatic development on Cloud platforms of undiscovered services by model transformation. Indeed, for each new development, a choice of PaaS (Platform as a Service) is performed by matching development constraints imposed by the stakeholder, with the features and services offered by the Cloud Platform.

This paper presents a hybrid model for the integrated development of products based on the decision models Funnel and Stage Gate. This hybrid model was designed in its complete and simplified versions with the main purpose of technological support in the process of developing new products based on the maturity development level of the company. The simplified model was applied in the development of a new product in a Brazilian telecommunications company through a case study, its results were described and analyzed and recommendations for the continuity of the research were presented.

The prosthesis design is a delicate and accurate engineering task that can be automated in the early steps before manufacturing. The challenge of the creation of the biomedical model is the complexity of the geometrical modelling as we have to deal with natural shapes. The representation of the human bones in terms of machining parameters the bottleneck in the design of complex products, and concurrent procedures can aid in this task. This work addresses the design requirements in order to build an anatomical skull prosthesis piece in the Computed Aided Design (CAD) systems. A novel methodology based on ellipse adjustment has been investigated in order to define the manufacture parameters. In geometric terms an ellipse seems with the bone's border shape in a Computed Tomography (CT) slice. The arc that fills the correspondent failure in the bone border is extracted from the respective adjusted ellipse to each CT slice and the set of those extracted arcs can be superimposed to define the stack of images to build a 3D CAD model. Evolutionary Algorithms were also applied to improve the quality of data generated. A prototype was implemented by an open source Java based tool (ImageJ) in order to create synthetic defects to simulate problems in the 3D virtual skull model. In context of product development this approach brings an essential integration between design and manufacturing process to reduce the elapse time among the medical procedure, modelling and machining.

This study aims to identify the factors fostering radical innovations during new product development (NPD), and investigate into the importance of customer involvements. Based on an analysis of a large number of relevant research, the hypothesis is established: H1, The customer is not the most or the only significant factor affecting radical innovation performances in NPD. To test H1, an interactive multiple regression model is adopted to detect the impacts of innovation-related factors. Through calculation and comparison, the results showed the radical innovations are more sensitive to professional consulting institutions such as ‘consultants, commercial lab or private R&D institutions’ rather than ‘customers, clients or end users’. Based on the analysis, conclusions are drawn that firms should properly distribute research focus on all important aspects, and carefully control the customer involvements so as to achieve the best benefits.

Understanding and fulfilling each individual customer's needs has been recognized as a great challenge for companies across industries. Customer needs management, which is essentially concerned with the relationship between customer needs in the customer domain and product specifications or function requirements in the product domain, needs to be well addressed in the product development process. However, there is a lack of effective knowledge-based techniques supporting the implementation of a customer needs management system to obtain accurate customer needs statements. In this paper, a customer needs management system (CNMS) that combines the ontology customer needs representation (OCNR) system with the Involvement/Thinking/Feeling (ITF) customer segmentation model is presented to obtain accurate customer needs statements. Through classifying different types of customers based on innovative characteristics, acquiring customer needs by involving the identified innovative customers and using the obtained customer needs to generate more accurate needs statements. The detailed process of overall system implementation was presented. System evaluations, including terminology evaluation and high level needs statements evaluation, were conducted. Results and findings from the customer needs management system implementation were also discussed and summarized.

Conventionally, Kansei engineering relies heavily on the intuition of the person who uses the method in clustering the Kansei. As a result, the selection of Kansei adjectives may not be consistent with the consumer's opinions. Nevertheless, to obtain a consumer-consistent result, all of the collected Kansei adjectives (usually hundreds) might need to be evaluated by every survey participant, which is impractical in most design cases. Accordingly, a Kansei clustering method based on design structure matrix (DSM) and graph decomposition (GD) is proposed in this work. The method breaks the Kansei adjectives down into a number of subsets for the ease of management among the survey participants. In so doing, each participant deals with only a portion of the collected words and the subsets are integrated using a DSM-based algorithm for an overall Kansei clustering result. In order to differentiate the groups in the combined DSM further, graph decomposition (GD) is used to yield non-exclusive Kansei clusters. The hybrid approach, i.e., using DSM and GD, is able to handle the Kansei clustering problem. A case study on cordless battery drills is used to illustrate the proposed approach. The obtained results are compared and discussed.

In this paper, we study task scheduling and load balancing in a heterogeneous server environment. Through a research on the dynamic requirements of load balancing service of the servers, we form an adaptive task scheduling and load balancing service framework based on customizable load feedback and dynamic scheduling strategy. Finally, we build and test a solution within a multidomain physical modeling and simulation service platform in the web environment-WebMWorks.

The overarching goal at the Integrated Design Laboratory (IDL) is to understand the mechanisms of decision making and exchanges among engineers. In this study a toolbox for the assessment of engineering performance in a realistic aircraft design task is presented. It allows for the assessment of participants in different experimental conditions. The degree of task difficulty and the amount and quality of visualization are systematically varied across conditions. Using a graphical user interface the participants' mouse trajectories can be tracked. This data together with performance evaluation of the generated aircraft design can help uncover details about the underlying decision making process. The design and the evaluation of the experimental toolbox are presented. This includes the number, specificity, and ranges of design variables that can be manipulated by a participant. The major difficulty thereby is to a find a “sweet spot” where the task is just difficult enough, such that participants display a progress in their performance. Too easy or too difficult of a task would lead to flooring or ceiling effects, where most participants will always fail or, respectively, perform perfectly. The decisions about the aircraft design parameters are therefore based on a numerical analysis of the design space. With this analysis nonlinearities and interdependencies of design parameters are revealed. The experimental toolbox will be utilized to measure design performance of individuals and groups. The results are expected to reveal ways to support multidisciplinary collaboration.

A rapidly growing approach in product design and manufacture, with great potential to improve customer value, is mass customization. The possibility to design and manufacture highly customer adapted products brings a competitive edge to manufacturing companies and is in some areas a necessity for doing business. In this paper, an approach for documentation and knowledge management of systems supporting the design and manufacture of customized products is explored. As the governing framework and models are updated and refined due to shifting prerequisite, the system and hence the solutions generated for a single specification will change over time. This affects product management and the ability to meet legislation and customers' requirements regarding documentation and traceability, as well as the company's ability to provide services, maintenance and supply spare parts. A solution has been developed for an industrial case with required functionality for capturing, structuring, searching, retrieving, viewing, and editing a system's embedded information and knowledge. The objective is to enable and facilitate system maintenance and updating and support the reuse of functions and system encapsulated generic design descriptions in future systems.

A Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) or Neural Network model is proposed to re-organize industries so that they can share knowledge and experience among them. This re-organized industry framework, which is called Parallel Distributed Engineering here, develops interchangeable components at its intermediate level and combines them into final products to meet the requirements of customers. Thus, it brings forth greater flexibility to adapt to very frequently and extensively changing situations and what is more important, it reduces time, cost and energy consumption and increase productivity considerably. And it will satisfy customers more because their diverse requirements can be more precisely met.

Product and service development is critical because new products and services are becoming the nexus of competition for many companies. Product and service development is thus a potential source of competitive advantage for many companies. Thus, product and service development is among the essential process for success, survival, and renewal of companies, particularly in competitive markets. Nowadays the design and development of new products and services or modification of existent ones (redesign) is a key and fundamental element to enhance innovation and competitiveness of industrial companies.

This paper presents the Business-Product-Service Portfolio Management (BPSPM) as an approach to manage the business portfolio for versioning and variation of the products and services development in order to succeed a business into more marketable set of products and services, jointly capable of fulfilling the stakeholders needs. BPSPM is a framework that encompassing the versioning and variation of products and services development concurrently for the products, services and their performing organisations analysis over perspectives of the strategic marketing, project management, engineering design and operations management.

There are five issues that the company must consider in BPSPM: the activities of relationship between global market and company; the activities of relationship between the providing company and stakeholders, representing a product-oriented and a service-oriented view respectively; the design activities of versioning and variety of the products and services; the specifications activities for versioning and variety of the products and services throughout all stages of life cycle, regarding the product and service life cycle and the marketing and sales life cycle; the representation activities of specifications and the elements of systems architecture for versioning and variety of the products and services throughout all stages of life cycle in manner of the hierarchy and heterarchy structures. The BPSPM framework uses the concepts of System Engineering, Concurrent Engineering, Service Engineering, Project Management and Business Portfolio presented in five dimensions, being Business dimension, Outcome dimension, Variety dimension, Life dimension and Structure dimension. The framework is described with SysML block definition diagrams.

In this paper, a data management system for measurement data and accuracy evaluation results of shipbuilding assemblies in shipbuilding manufacturing process is proposed. In the accuracy evaluation system, the accuracy of assemblies is calculated by comparing measurement data obtained by laser scanner to design data. The analysis process for the accuracy can be defined for each structural member. The system is evaluated in the empirical case study and some assumptions for improvement of the manufacturing process are found.

The early phase of design contains multiple sources of unexpected circumstances which include the change or addition of performance requirements or design conditions with the process of the design phases. Therefore, designers are required to design considering those unexpected circumstances in the after phases. Previously, we proposed a preference set-based design (PSD) method, which obtains a unique design solution set from a point of view of design preference and robustness under various sources of uncertainties while incorporating the designer's preference in the early phase of design. PSD method represents the uncertain design information as the interval set. This paper proposes a new design method based on PSD method which can obtain diverse possible design solution sets for unexpected circumstances by deriving the multiple feasible design domains which satisfy the required performances. Obtaining diverse possible design solution sets could deal with the unexpected circumstances by selecting the optimal design solution from obtained diverse possible design solution sets in the early phase. In this paper, the proposed design method is applied to the design problem of an active isolation system of 4-story building to correspond to the additional unexpected earthquake ground motion which the designer cannot consider at the early phase of design.

Concurrent Engineering (CE) has been one of the major topics in the last few decades to achieve the goal of cost and time reduction as well as quality improvement. Achievement of CE is based on the collaboration of various activities ranging from design disciplines, manufacturing and assembly, marketing and purchasing, all the way to the end users. In this respect, collaboration of people from various activities among different locations is crucial to the success of CE. To support collaboration between two difference places, various types of communication tools are available these days, including business video conference systems such as Polycom, or proprietary Voice over IP services such as Skype. Even though remote communication is available with these tools, participants who are physically separated during a meeting do not have the same feeling as a face-to-face meeting because of several reasons. Some of them would be the lack of presence and immersion. This study proposes an idea of body movement-based interaction during a remote meeting to feel the presence of remote participants, and to experience the immersion into the virtual space. According to the literature, the four movement features potentially influence the immersion in virtual space; namely natural control, mimicry of movements, proprioceptive feedback, and physical challenge. This study focuses on two types of body movement, namely hand gesture and head movement, to implement the idea of body movement-based interaction. Hand gesture covers the natural control and mimicry of movement towards a distant object. This study uses a pair of acceleration sensors and an inclined plastic panel for movement-based interaction. The acceleration sensors detect hand motion and position, and the detected signal is recognized by a signal-recognition algorithm. A plastic panel is used to fold both hands during manipulation by providing comfortable and easy operation. The panel also works to project the hand gesture in three dimensional space onto its two dimensional gesture, which makes it easier to design the detection algorithm [23]. As a bench level experiment, it was recognized that the hand motion controlled the distant object for simple manipulation. Head movement covers the physical challenge as well as the mimicry of head movement using a physical object. This study uses a gyro sensor attached to around ear in order to detect head movement of the subject during the conversation. The detected signal by the sensor was used to control the remote robotic arm, which holds the smart phone for Voice over IP communication, and to mimic the head movement of the subject in a remote place. As a result, presence of a remote subject was significantly recognized in the physically active movement of the phone, which was quite different in comparison with the fixed position of the phone. The idea of body movement-based interaction was proposed and implemented in the two types of movement, or hand gesture and head movement. Based on the preliminary experiments for these two types, feasibility of the idea will be discussed in this paper.

Introducing computerized systems to automate engineering design activities (design automation) on manufacturing companies promises improved product quality, shortened time to production, increased control on cost, less effort to adapt products to new customer requirements. Due to these motives, big effort has been put on developing computer systems automating a variety of engineering design activities throughout the product and production development process. The question is now: Is design automation ready to launch yet? In this paper, we review four cases of design automation of engineer-to-order to give guidelines for developing engineering design automation systems.

Paper considers problems of service process improvement. Process characteristics, expressed by the means of verbal expressions, are the key features that lead to consumer satisfaction. A mathematical model of verbal estimation and a method of service process improvement are proposed. Verbal estimation based on fuzzy logic described. Paper provides software simulation of a process verbal analysis and improvement. General results and the application in health service described.

Early on, with the technological developments, machines have replaced the human workers which pave the way to mass production for decades. With the increase of variety of goods and number of producers, competition has grown to produce cheap, high number of goods with high quality. This has led the producers to think about ways to lessen the scraps and prevent problems. Thus, techniques and approaches like Total Quality Management, Lean Manufacturing, Six-Sigma have been developed and grown in importance.

Whereas in today's competitive world what is counted as success is no more the ability to produce but also to design. World trend is growing to find ways to design the most rapid, cost effective and quality product. In a similar way to the progress of production, new approaches, methodologies and principles are being generated and initiatives are established to fulfill this need in engineering area.

Challenges increase in diversity and difficulty in parallel with the complexity of the design. Until now, companies used product data management methods and tools in order to integrate and provide the running of the tasks. Further developments in information technology shall be used to put in more knowledge to these systems to lessen the routine design work while enabling the designer to touch the tacit-knowledge.

This paper will examine the lean thinking in engineering and try to harmonize the Lean Engineering Approach with Concurrent Engineering (CE) Philosophy. Principles to enable CE applications in Aerospace Industry will be developed and an analogy of Lean techniques will be outlined.

One of the missions of the United States Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) is to develop and assess technologies for next generation aerospace systems. Currently, the assessment is achieved using empirical relationships and historical data associated with systems developed previously. The assessment is done in this fashion due to resource constraints on time, personnel, and funding. Performing technology assessment in such a fashion, although timely, is not necessarily accurate. This is due to the fact that many of the technologies and system configurations being evaluated have no historical or empirical information associated with them. Hence, traditional assessment techniques produce misleading results and subsequently ill-informed decisions by Air Force leadership associated with technology investment and potential future system capabilities. To address this issue the Multidisciplinary Science and Technology Center within AFRL's Aerospace Systems Directorate is developing physics-based design exploration and technology assessment methods and processes. The new methods and processes utilize physics-based analyses and a distributed collaborative computational environment to predict vehicle performance which in turn is used in mission level simulations to assess the impact of a given configuration or technology on the combat effectiveness of a system. The new methods and processes will be executable within the same time and resource constraints of the traditional process. This enables AFRL technology developers to have a quantifiable and traceable trail of the impact of their technologies on system performance parameters such as weight, lift, and drag into terms that Air Force leadership measures system effectiveness – lethality, survivability, sustainability, and affordability. This leads to well informed decisions concerning technology investment and achievable capabilities.

Cloud manufacturing is a new service-oriented networked manufacturing paradigm which can integrate various physical manufacturing resources and manufacturing capacities and provide manufacturing services of the lifecycle for the product. It is a new research direction in the field of the advanced manufacturing. In this paper, a provisioning method of service resources for cloud manufacturing is studied. Firstly, the service-oriented architectures are investigated to decide the service architecture for the encapsulation of manufacturing resources. Then a three-step provisioning method of manufacturing services are proposed, a function-classification based manufacturing service interface is defined, and the encapsulation strategies for four categories of manufacturing resources including intelligence resource, knowledge resource, tool resource and manufacturing capacity are put forward, and the dynamic provisioning process of manufacturing service is described. By the proposed method, the four categories of manufacturing resources can be dynamically provisioned as services with well-defined service interfaces for cloud manufacturing.

In this paper, we present a collaborative, web-based framework to create 3D scenarios for product design, simulation and training assisted by animated avatars. To support correct design and anticipate critical design decisions we employ a verification approach to check for safety and reachability properties. By animating the 3D model based on prover results (trace witnesses out of constructive proofs) the system provides tangible feedback of the verification to the designer. We describe the components of the framework and illustrate the functionality based on an existing factory production line.