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With the increasing competition of the manufacturing industry, it is essential for manufacturers to develop a new (or next)-generation product based on their prior product design, product user experience, historical performances, etc. The digital twin (DT) is believed to be a suitable technology to support product lifecycle management with excellent data capture and analysis capabilities and product family design capabilities. However, it remains a challenge to synthesize and incorporate the data and information captured from previous generational product development and stored on their individual digital twin instances (DTIs) into next-generation product design. To address this problem, this study proposes a new nominal digital twin (NDT) concept as a collective digital representation of the current generational product digital mockups (DMUs) and all individual DTIs of the built products in services for new-generational product development. NDT is first defined here as a prototypical and synthesized digital twin (or digital representation) of multiple individual digital twins corresponding to multiple physical products in use or previously used. By analyzing the data and information on their DTIs, NDT can enable the establishment and evolution of a more precise approximated model of many related family products used previously or currently in use in various application scenarios and environments in the physical world. This paper also demonstrates how a NDT model can be first established in the product design phase from various digital mockup models and enhanced later with a stochastic forest meta-model based on Bayesian optimization connected to DTIs. With this NDT model, collaborative exploration for optimal design solutions during new-generation product design and improvement can be performed on NDT through multi-objective optimization, which in turn can make new-generation product design easier and quicker. As a primary verification of the feasibility of our proposed approach, a case study has been carried out, and the results have well confirmed that the NDT-based new-generation product design approach is feasible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With intense global competition, many enterprises adopt platform strategies to develop diverse products with a lower corresponding increase in cost and a shorter lead time. In the past, enormous efforts have been made in investigating product platforms. Recent researches and practices show that developing Uncertainty-Oriented Product Platform (UOPP) is a promising approach to improving the adaptability of enterprises to meet uncertain markets, customer requirements, technologies, policies, and regulations, etc., which includes flexible product platform, adaptable product platform, market-driven product platform, and sustainable product platform. This paper provides a comprehensive review in this field, including the connotation of uncertainty, the concepts of emerging UOPPs, the development process of UOPP, as well as the development technologies in each step. It also highlights the future research framework, opportunities and challenges. This literature review lays the foundation for future research of product platform design under uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of Industry 4.0, design of a smart product to work in a smart factory, or at home or city over its lifecycle has to consider its intelligent interaction with its external environment (physical, human and cyberspace environments). Thus, environment interaction-driven design of smart products becomes an important design research field, facing a huge challenge of integrating a smart product and its environment interaction design crossing all its life phases. In this paper, a high-profile design framework is proposed for guiding environment interaction model-driven smart products through-life design. It has three core elements: (1) a generic environment interaction model of a smart product through-life phases, which can help map out the interaction requirements between the smart product and other interaction elements through-life phases, (2) a smart product design process model for guiding product and its interaction design at each phase and (3) a design strategy of smart products through-life design. Its implementation feasibility is demonstrated with an industrial case study, showing that it is helpful to implement design solutions to a smart product for satisfying intelligent interactions with its external environments through-life phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Designing a complex mechatronic product involves multiple design variables, objectives, constraints, and evaluation criteria as well as their nonlinearly coupled relationships. The design space can be very big consisting of many functional design parameters, structural design parameters, and behavioral design (or running performances) parameters. Given a big design space and inexplicit relations among them, how to design a product optimally in an optimization design process is a challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose a systematic optimization design method based on design space reduction and surrogate modelling techniques. This method firstly identifies key design parameters from a very big design space to reduce the design space, secondly uses the identified key design parameters to establish a system surrogate model based on data-driven modelling principles for optimization design, and thirdly utilizes the multiobjective optimization techniques to achieve an optimal design of a product in the reduced design space. This method has been tested with a high-speed train design. With comparison to others, the research results show that this method is practical and useful for optimally designing complex mechatronic products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptual design has a decisive impact on the product development time, cost and success. This paper presents a new conceptual design method for achieving rapid and effective mapping from product design specification (PDS) to concept design. This method can guide the creation of reasonable mapping among the PDS, behaviour parameters and structure parameters and to evaluate the rationality of performance parameters and structure parameters to confirm a reasonable conceptual design scheme. In this method, we establish a PDS-behaviour-structure conceptual design model to support the conceptual design of multi-disciplinary-oriented complex product system (CoPS) and develop a vector-based mapping tool in this method to support the rapid mapping, and demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness by a case study. This method is not only supportive to realise the automation of a conceptual design process but also helpful to evaluate the conceptual design in the field of engineering design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For complex mechanical systems, to overcome design inconsistencies, it is becoming more and more necessary that product design system is effectively integrated with various analysis models and tools from multiple engineering domains at different design stages. In this article, a Holistic Product Design and Analysis Model, which is well supported by Top–Down design method, is conceptualized to define design and analysis integration at different levels, which will help enhance engineering design and analysis interoperability and integrate the design methods and analysis tools across multiple engineering domains. It is based on four design levels: system, subsystem, machine and component designs; at each level, design and analysis models are integrated under a Generalized Multirepresentation Architecture supporting design, analysis and optimization appropriately. For cross-level integration from top to bottom, the design models are transferred and mapped with more structural and geometric details, while analysis models obtain more detailed design constraints from the top levels. This new architecture has been developed and demonstrated with an application in a railway vehicle system design, although its optimization components have not been fully implemented. This model can be used for general mechanical product system design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]