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In this work, we show that bioinspired function-sharing can be effectively leveraged in engineering design by abstracting and emulating the product architecture of biological systems that exhibit function-sharing. Systems that leverage function-sharing enable multiple functions to be performed by a single structure. Billions of years of evolution have led to the development of function-sharing adaptations in biological systems. Currently, engineers leverage biological function-sharing by imitating serendipitously encountered biological structures. As a result, utilizing bioinspired function-sharing remains limited to some specific engineering problems. To overcome this limitation, we propose the reduced function-means tree as a tool to simultaneously abstract both biological adaptations and their associated product architecture. The tool uses information from an existing bioinspired design abstraction tool and an existing product architecture representation tool. A demonstration study illustrates the tool's ability to abstract the product architectural interactions of function-sharing biological systems. The abstracted product architectural interactions are then shown to facilitate problem-driven bioinspiration of function-sharing. The availability of a problem-driven approach may reduce the need to imitate biological structures to leverage biological function-sharing in engineering design. This work is a step forward in analyzing biological product architectures to inspire engineering design. The future work will focus on validating the proposed tool by performing user studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A function-based keyword search is a concept generation methodology studied in the bioinspired design area that conveys textual biological inspiration for engineering design. Current keyword search methods are inefficient primarily due to the knowledge gap between engineering and biology domains. To improve current keyword search methods, we propose an algorithm that extracts and organizes morphology-based solutions from biological text. WordNet is utilized to discover morphological solutions in biological text. The novel algorithm also adapts latent semantic analysis and the expectation–maximization algorithm to categorize morphological solutions and group biological text. We introduce a novel penalty function that reflects the distance between functions (problems) and morphologies (solutions). The penalty function allows the algorithm to extract morphological solutions directly related to a design problem. We compare the output of the algorithm to manually extracted solutions for validation. A case study is included to exemplify the utility of the developed algorithm. Upon implementation of the algorithm, engineering designers can discover innovative solutions in biological text in a straightforward, efficient manner. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Identifying failure paths and potentially hazardous scenarios resulting from component faults and interactions is a challenge in the early design process. The inherent complexity present in large engineered systems leads to nonobvious emergent behavior, which may result in unforeseen hazards. Current hazard analysis techniques focus on single hazards (fault trees), single faults (event trees), or lists of known hazards in the domain (hazard identification). Early in the design of a complex system, engineers may represent their system as a functional model. A function failure reasoning tool can then exhaustively simulate qualitative failure scenarios. Some scenarios can be identified as hazardous by hazard rules specified by the engineer, but the goal is to identify scenarios representing unknown hazards. The incidences of specific subgraphs in graph representations of known hazardous scenarios are used to train a classifier to distinguish hazard from nonhazard. The algorithm identifies the scenario most likely to be hazardous, and presents it to the engineer. After viewing the scenario and judging its safety, the engineer may have insight to produce additional hazard rules. The collaborative process of strategic presentation of scenarios by the computer and human judgment will identify previously unknown hazards. The feasibility of this methodology has been tested on a relatively simple functional model of an electrical power system with positive results. Related work applying function failure reasoning to a team of robotic rovers will provide data from a more complex system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimized lightweight manufacturing of parts is crucial for automotive and aeronautical industries in order to stay competitive and to reduce costs and fuel consumption. Hence, aluminum becomes an unquestionable material choice regarding these challenges. Nevertheless, using only virgin aluminum is not satisfactory because its extraction requires high use of energy and effort, and its manufacturing has high environmental impact. For these reasons, the use of recycled aluminum alloys is recommended considering their properties meet the expected technical and environmental added values. This requires complete reengineering of the classical life cycle of aluminum-based products and the collaboration practices in the global supply chain. The results from several interdependent disciplines all need to be taken into account for a global product/process optimization. Toward achieving this, a method for sustainability assessment integration into product life cycle management and a platform for life cycle simulation integrating environmental concerns are proposed in this paper. The platform may be used as a decision support system in the early product design phase by simulating the life cycle of a product (from material selection to production and recycling phases) and calculating its impact on the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In decision-based design, the principal role of a designer is to make decisions. Decision support is crucial to augment this role. In this paper, we present an ontology that provides decision support from both the “construct” and the “information” perspectives that address the gap that existing research focus on these two perspectives separately and cannot provide effective decision support. The decision support construct in the ontology is the compromise decision support problem (cDSP) that is used to make multiobjective design decisions. The information for decision making is archived as cDSP templates and represented using frame-based ontology for facilitating reuse, consistency maintaining, and rapid execution. In order to facilitate designers’ effective reuse of the populated cDSP templates ontology instances, we identified three types of modification that can be made when design consideration evolves. In our earlier work, part of the utilization (consistency checking) of the ontology has been demonstrated through a thin-walled pressure vessel redesign example. In this paper, we comprehensively present the ontology utilization including consistency checking, trade-off analysis, and design space visualization based on the pressure vessel example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Requirement planning is one of the most critical tasks in the product development process. Despite its significant impact on the outcomes of the design process, engineering requirement planning is often conducted in an ad hoc manner without much structure. In particular, the requirement planning phase suffers from a lack of quantifiable measures for evaluating the quality of the generated requirements and also a lack of structure and formality in representing engineering requirements. The main objective of this research is to develop a formal Web Ontology Language ontology for standard representation of engineering requirements. The proposed ontology uses explicit semantics that makes the ontology amenable to automated reasoning. To demonstrate how the proposed ontology can support requirement analysis and evaluation in engineering design, three possible services enabled by the ontology are introduced in this paper. These services are information content measurement, specificity and completeness analysis, and requirement classification. The proposed ontology and its associated algorithms and tools are validated experimentally in this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product platforms, product families, and modular design are an evolving research area. Many of the theories and concepts proposed serve as powerful tools to industry in reducing the number of specialized components in products, reducing assembly time and accelerating the conceptual and embodiment design stages. In this paper, a structured approach to the modular design of electro-mechanical consumer products is proposed based on a study of the module structure of products. The approach is based on developing product family design templates. These templates are based on prior product design knowledge and the flow and conversion of energy through a product. The templates also carry potential embodiment solution information. Design templates for two product classes, electricity to thermal energy and electricity to rotational energy , have been developed and can be used by designers to undertake design or re-design efforts on products. A group of 16 consumer products from two product families has been used in this study. A clarifying design example is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tolerance design remains a key challenge in engineering design. The goal of the research presented in this article is to address this challenge through the identification and organization of novel tolerance design principles. These tolerance design principles are developed through a careful study of the literature, observation of commonly recurring tolerance solutions, and design strategies implied by the existing tolerance design literature. A key and novel contribution of the work presented in this article is that tolerance design is treated as a concurrent design problem. Tolerance design begins prior to assembly requirements and parameter design. Through the application of the principles presented here, tolerance design can be addressed through changes in product architecture and functionality. In addition, these principles provide a focus for developing new methodologies that will have high impact on engineering practice. These principles are formally organized to facilitate usage and extension. The usage and impact of these principles is shown through an example application to an original design problem. The design case study is an electric guitar pickup winder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In engineering design, all products and artifacts have some intended reason behind their existence: the product or artifact function. Functional modeling provides an abstract, yet direct, method for understanding and representing an overall product or artifact function. Functional modeling also strategically guides design activities such as problem decomposition, physical modeling, product architecting, concept generation, and team organization. A formal function representation is needed to support functional modeling, and a standardized set of function-related terminology leads to repeatable and meaningful results from such a representation. We refer to this representation as a functional basis; in this paper, we seek to reconcile and integrate two independent research efforts into a significantly evolved functional basis. These efforts include research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and two US universities, and their industrial partners. The overall approach for integrating the functional representations and the final results are presented. This approach also provides a mechanism for evaluating whether future revisions are needed to the functional basis and, if so, how to proceed. The integration process is discussed relative to differences, similarities, insights into the representations, and product validation. Based on the results, a more versatile and comprehensive design vocabulary emerges. This vocabulary will greatly enhance and expand the frontiers of research in design repositories, product architecture, design synthesis, and general product modeling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract. In this paper, a novel technique is presented to solve tolerance design problems. To achieve the desired performance tolerance, the technique uses a subtle, but significant, change in the design: the addition of a tuning parameter in place of an increase in component precision. Statistical models are used lo develop a framework for the tuning parameter design method. Also developed is a new, dimensionless design metric which ranks candidate tuning parameters. A step-by-step method is developed for the application of tuning parameters using this metric. The step-by-step tuning parameter design method is applied to a heavy-duty manual stapler as a clarifying example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyzes the role of bioinspired product architecture in facilitating the design of robust engineering systems. Prior works have proposed design guidelines to facilitate the implementation of bioinspired product architectures for engineered systems. This work shows that implementing a bioinspired product architecture may improve a system's robustness to random module failures, but may degrade the system's effectiveness in the absence of any module failure. To demonstrate such a trade-off between the robustness and the undisrupted effectiveness of a system, this study quantitatively compares biological systems to their functionally equivalent modular systems. The modular equivalents of biological systems are first derived by utilizing Functional Modeling. The application of the bioinspired product architecture guidelines is then modeled as a transition from the modular product architecture of the modular equivalents to the actual product architecture of the biological systems. The effectiveness and the robustness of the systems are analyzed after the application of each guideline by modeling the systems as multi-flow directed networks. Such an analysis is performed by introducing metrics that quantify a system's expected effectiveness and the degradation in the system's expected effectiveness with increasing severity of random disruptions. The findings are validated by designing and analyzing a COVID-19 breathalyzer as an engineering case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this study is to position speculative fiction as a broader framework to stimulate, facilitate, and study engineering design ideation. For this, we first present a comprehensive and detailed review of the literature on how fiction, especially science fiction, has played a role in design and decision-making. To further strengthen the need for speculative fiction for idea stimulation, we further prototype and study a prototype workflow that utilizes excerpts from speculative fiction books as textual stimuli for design ideation. Through a qualitative study of this workflow, we gain insights into the effect of textual stimuli from science fiction narratives on design concepts. Our study reveals that the texts consisting of the terms from the design statement or closely related to the problem boost the idea generation process. We further discover that less directly related stimuli may encourage out-of-the-box and divergent thinking. Using the insights gained from our study, we pose critical questions to initiate speculative fiction-based design ideation as a new research direction in engineering design. Subsequently, we discuss current research directions and domains necessary to take the technical, technological, and methodological steps needed for future research on design methodologies based on speculative fictional inspiration. Finally, we present a practical case to demonstrate how an engineering design workflow could be operationalized by investigating a concrete example of the design of automotive user interfaces (automotive-UI) through the lens of speculative fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work deduces principles of bioinspired product architecture to effectively leverage biological function-sharing in engineering design. Function-sharing enables a single structure to perform multiple functions and can improve the performance characteristics of a system. The process of evolution via natural selection has led to the emergence of function-sharing adaptations in biological systems. However, the current practice of bioinspired function-sharing is largely limited to the solution-driven imitation of biological structures. This work aims to overcome such limitations by performing a function-based analysis of biological product architectures. First, a phylogenetic approach is used to select generalized case studies from the animal kingdom. Next, the product architectures of the selected case studies are then modeled using function modeling and analyzed by clustering the identified functions into modules. A function-based categorization of the sampled biological modules reveals the presence of four types of modules in the biological case studies. Analyzing the function-sharing scenarios associated with each type of biological module enables us to deduce four guidelines for bioinspired development and arrangement of function-sharing modules. Finally, a demonstration study applies the guidelines to the design of an inlet-outlet port for a washer-dryer system. The deduced guidelines can enable engineers to identify function-sharing scenarios in the early stages of product design and reduce the need to imitate biological structures for function-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The optimal length and format for concept generation is largely unknown. One experiment compares a 50-min session to a 2-h session, observing that senior undergraduates generate more ideas and a greater variety of solutions with additional time, although high novelty solutions are developed within the first 50 min. A second study finds that more novel solutions are generated after an incubation period, although it is at the expense of feasibility. Comparing the two studies shows that incubation generates a greater quantity of ideas, while extended time aids in high quality and novelty. Since the 50-min and 2-h groups generate similar numbers of high quality and high novelty solutions, a 50-min ideation period is effective for developing high quality, novel solutions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]