Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Manufacturing is facing unprecedented challenges due to increased variety, market volatility and distributed global manufacturing. The breadth of complexity of the design process, products, manufacturing, and business must be considered throughout the products life cycle. The products considered in this research follow the engineering specific perspective described in the ISO 9000 guideline. In accordance with this guideline a product is a physical or digital good, resulting from a value adding process (i.e. manufacturing process). Furthermore, smart products and systems are cyber-physical systems (CPS), and there is a need for new engineering design theories and methodologies capable of dealing with the multi-disciplinary complexity of CPS.
To address these challenges, scientific approaches to design theories and methodologies (DTM) and collaborative engineering have been developed in earlier and recent discovery research, as well as ways to manage the complexity of engineered systems. Recently also a new engineering design paradigm has also been introduced by the Applicant: “the quadruple bottom line”. This innovation is based primarily on achieving the traditional triple objectives of the best quality product, economically and in a timely manner, as well as meeting the manufacturing sustainability imperatives. For enterprises to be sustainable in the future, they must adopt continuous innovation requirements and changeability enablers while producing environmentally friendly products and satisfying the socio-technical objectives, hence meeting the quadruple bottom line.
In this context, this research will investigate three new aspects: A) Engineering design methodologies for smart products; B) Design of changeable and reconfigurable manufacturing systems; and C) Design of global supply chains for the unexpected. The three topics share fundamental design theories and methodologies (DTM), from the functional and physical perspectives, and discrete mathematics: set theories, relations and functions, and graph theory for representing the interactions within the different domains. The research focuses on managing the engineering complexity of smart cyber-physical products and systems (“Industry 4.0”). The scope of complexity includes: 1) product, 2) system, and 3) system of systems such as a global supply chain. The type of complexity may be classified as static or dynamic, and complexity is considered at both the physical and the functional domains.
The results from this research will include methodologies and tools that can be directly applied by systems engineers and managers in industry to control the complexity problems intrinsic in the design of smart products, systems and supply chains. This research will train 2 PhD and 1 Master’s student at a time, for a total of 6 HQP directly and at least another 6 HQP indirectly including a PDF and 4 Bachelor students.