Smart Products and System Design for Sustainable Manufacturing

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Manufacturing is facing unprecedented challenges due to increased variety, market volatility and distributed global manufacturing. The complexity of the design process, products, manufacturing, and business must be considered throughout the products life cycle. A product is a physical or digital good, resulting from a value adding processes (e.g. manufacturing process). New smart products and systems are adaptable cyber-physical systems (CPS), and there is a need for new engineering design theories and methodologies (DTM) capable of dealing with the multi-disciplinary complexity of CPS. To address these challenges DTM, collaborative engineering as well as complexity theories will be adapted for managing the complexity of engineered systems. 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. This research will investigate three new aspects: A) Engineering design methodologies for smart products; B) Design of changeable manufacturing systems; and C) Design of global supply chains for the unexpected and building strategic flexibility. The three topics share fundamental design theories and methodologies (DTM), from the functional and physical perspectives, and discrete mathematics: set theories, relations and functions as well as 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. The scope of complexity includes: 1) product, 2) system, and 3) system of systems such as a global supply chain. Both static and dynamic complexity will be 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.