This book of proceedings contains papers peer-reviewed and accepted for the 26th ISTE International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering, held at the University of Tokyo, Kashiwa Campus, July 30 – August 1, 2019, Japan. This is the eight issue of the newly introduced series “Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering”, which publishes the proceedings of the TE (formerly: CE) conference series and accompanying events. The TE/CE conference series is organized annually by the International Society of Transdisciplinary Engineering, in short ISTE (www.intsoctransde.org), formerly called International Society of Productivity Enhancement (ISPE, Inc.) and constitutes an important forum for international scientific exchange on transdisciplinary engineering. These international conferences attract a significant number of researchers, industry experts and students, as well as government representatives, who are interested in the recent advances in transdisciplinary engineering research, advancements and applications.

Developed in the 80’s, the CE approach is based on the concept that different phases of a product life cycle should be conducted concurrently and initiated as early as possible within the Product Creation Process (PCP), including the implications of this approach within the extended enterprise and networks. The main goal of CE is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the PCP and to reduce errors in the later phases, as well as to incorporate considerations for the full lifecycle, through-life operations, and environmental issues. In the past decades, CE has become the substantive basic methodology in many industries (e.g., automotive, aerospace, machinery, shipbuilding, consumer goods, process industry, environmental engineering) and is also adopted in the development of new services and service support.

The initial basic CE concepts have matured and have become the foundations of many new ideas, methodologies, initiatives, approaches and tools. Generally, the current CE focus concentrates on collaboration within and between enterprises and its many different elements. Current research on CE is driven again by many factors like increased customer demands, globalization, (international) collaboration and environmental strategies. The successful application of CE in the past opens also the perspective for future applications like overcoming natural catastrophes, sustainable mobility concepts with electrical vehicles, and intensive, integrated, data processing. Due to the increasing importance of transdisciplinarity, the board of ISPE, Inc., now ISTE, decided to rename the conference series in “Transdisciplinary Engineering” in 2016.

The concept of transdisciplinarity transcends inter- and multi-disciplinary ways of working. It is also aimed at aligning different types of knowledge. In particular, transdisciplinary processes are aimed at solving complex ill-defined problems or problems for which the solution is not obvious from the beginning. In addition, such problems, including their solutions, have a large impact on society and the context in which the problems exist. It is important that people from society and practice collaborate with people from scientific communities. Moreover, for the respective problems, single disciplines cannot bring sufficient knowledge for solving those problems. Collaboration between disciplines is needed. Disciplines should be open to other disciplines to be able to share and exchange the knowledge necessary for solving the problem. In particular, technical and social science disciplines need to collaborate to use the best of different worlds.

Any engineering problem can be put is a context in which the problem is to be solved or in which the solution for the problem is expected to be used. For researchers and engineers it is important to take into account this context. This could be done, for example, by collaborating with researchers who can study user acceptance of the envisioned solution or with researchers who can apply suitable methods to acquire user preferences in the respective context and translated them into the necessary requirements for the solution to be developed.

The conference is entitled: “Transdisciplinary Engineering for Complex Socio-technical Systems”. The TE2019 Organizing Committee has identified 23 thematic areas within TE and launched a Call For Papers accordingly. In total 86 papers have been submitted from all continents of the world. The submissions as well as invited talks have been collated into 10 themes led by outstanding researchers and practitioners.

The Proceedings contains 68 peer-reviewed papers presented at the conference by authors from 17 countries. These papers range from the theoretical, conceptual to strongly pragmatic addressing industrial best practice. The involvement of industry in many of the presented papers gives additional importance to this conference.

This book on “Transdisciplinary Engineering for Complex Socio-technical Systems” is directed at three constituencies: researchers, design practitioners, and educators. Researchers will benefit from the latest research results and knowledge of product creation processes and related methodologies. Engineering professionals and practitioners will learn from the current state of the art in transdisciplinary engineering practice, new approaches, methods, tools and their applications. The educators in the TE community gather the latest advances and methodologies for dissemination in engineering curricula, to prepare students for transdisciplinary collaboration in complex engineering processes, while the community also encourages young educators to bring new ideas into the field.

The proceedings are subdivided into several parts, reflecting the themes addressed in the conference programme:

Part 1 is entitled Advanced Robotics for Smart Manufacturing and contains papers on diverse subjects like energy source systems, TE projects, and distributed sensing systems.

Part 2 outlines the importance of Design of Personalized Products and Services. It contains papers addressing configuration projects, energy-efficient water dispensing systems, better customer-perceived value, and product configuration in Industry 4.0.

Part 3, Engineering Methods for Industry 4.0, contains subjects like student support for sustainable smart industry, knowledge-based engineering, design case study of a design with CPS, prediction of bulk freight based on movement data, exploration of bias-breaking in emission reduction, design platform for customized housing, and a workshop for supporting collaborative problem framing.

Part 4 contains papers in the theme Additive and Subtractive Manufacturing addressing e.g., challenges for additive manufacturing in HPDC tooling, aerospace component design and evaluation, and theory of constraints for corporate management.

Part 5 is entitled Decision Support Tools and Methods. It focuses on multi-criteria decision-making for energy renewal, visualization of shop floor and for pairwise comparison, deep learning image recognition for green behavior, trends in product platforms, personal mobility services, TE for smart product-service systems, technologies for offshore industries, design for user preferences, TE approach for decision-support tool performance, product development methodology, technology roadmaps, and simulation of project duration estimation.

Part 6 contains contributions on Complex Systems Engineering with various contributions like a design estimation model, lessons for machine learning, socio-technical systems, approaches to electricity load prediction, prospects of IoT, prototype for detection of landmines, ontology for IoT protocols, digital twin for sensor failure, technical risk management, methods for industrial object recognition, change propagation in project management, innovative suspension system design, enterprise approach to risk modeling, mathematical models for various applications, a platform-based OEM-supplier collaboration, and an air mobile stroke unit.

Part 7 is entitled Big Data Analytics in Manufacturing and Services. It illustrates some approaches to neural networks for trademark infringement detection, probabilistic project risk evaluation, decisions in complex urban infrastructure design, synonym detection in document mining, and fault detection and classification.

Part 8 deals with Concurrent Engineering. This part contains contributions on musculoskeletal motion analysis, ill-defined knowledge boundaries, materials for valve construction, knowledge objects for knowledge management and design automation, and knowledge support for the design-automation lifecycle.

Part 9 contains contributions on Cost Modeling, Analysis and Engineering addressing various methodologies for cost estimation in product development, recycling costs, optimization of labor control, and a survey on requirements management.

Part 10, Digital Manufacturing, Modeling and Simulation, contains papers on methods for complex social realities engineering, systems modeling evaluation, automatic digital twin generation, visualization of complex products and processes, augmented operator proposal, and system modeling for software development.

We acknowledge the high quality contributions of all authors to this book and the work of the members of the International Program Committee who assisted with the blind peer-review of the original papers submitted and presented at the conference. Readers are sincerely invited to consider all of the contributions made by this year’s participants through the presentation of TE2019 papers collated into this book of proceedings. We hope that they will be further inspired in their work for disseminating their ideas for new approaches for sustainable, integrated, product development in a multi-disciplinary environment within the ISTE community.

Kazuo Hiekata, Conference Chair

University of Tokyo, Japan

Bryan R. Moser, Conference Co-Chair

MIT, USA / University of Tokyo, Japan

Masato Inoue, Program Chair

Meiji University, Japan

Josip Stjepandić, Co-Program Chair

PROSTEP AG, Germany

Nel Wognum, Co-Program Chair

TU Delft, The Netherlands