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EVOKE: A Value-Driven Concept Selection Method for Early System Design

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Abstract

The development of new technologically advanced products requires the contribution from a range of skills and disciplines, which are often difficult to find within a single company or organization. Requirements establishment practices in Systems Engineering (SE), while ensuring coordination of activities and tasks across the supply network, fall short when it comes to facilitate knowledge sharing and negotiation during early system design. Empirical observations show that when system-level requirements are not available or not mature enough, engineers dealing with the development of long lead-time sub-systems tend to target local optima, rather than opening up the design space. This phenomenon causes design teams to generate solutions that do not embody the best possible configuration for the overall system. The aim of this paper is to show how methodologies for value-driven design may address this issue, facilitating early stage design iterations and the resolution of early stage design trade-offs. The paper describes how such methodologies may help gathering and dispatching relevant knowledge about the ‘design intent’ of a system to the cross-functional engineering teams, so to facilitate a more concurrent process for requirement elicitation in SE. The paper also describes EVOKE (Early Value Oriented design exploration with KnowledgE maturity), a concept selection method that allows benchmarking design options at sub-system level on the base of value-related information communicated by the system integrators. The use of EVOKE is exemplified in an industrial case study related to the design of an aero-engine component. EVOKE’s ability to raise awareness on the value contribution of early stage design concepts in the SE process has been further verified with industrial practitioners in ad-hoc design episodes.

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received financial support by: European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) through the CRESCENDO project under grant agreement n◦234344, and the Swedish Knowledge and Competence Development Foundation through the Model Driven Development and Decision Support research profile at Blekinge Institute of Technology, and the VINNOVA National Aviation Engineering Programme in Sweden, through the Virtual Turbine Module Demonstrator (VITUM) project.

The authors would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their help to improve the quality of the paper.

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Marco Bertoni earned his PhD degree in virtual prototypes and real products at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 2008. He is currently an Associate Professor in product innovation at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. He has experience from European FP6 and FP7 research projects in the domain of aerospace, working closely with industrial companies in the topics of systems engineering, value driven design, product service system design and enterprise collaboration. His research objective is to understand how knowledge from the later phases of a system’s lifecycle (about how the system is manufactured, operated, serviced, maintained, upgraded, remanufactured or recycled) can be systematically captured and used to support decision-making activities during preliminary design. His work has brought to the development of design decision support models that use ‘value’ to guide early concept selection activities, as well as of methodological and technological enablers for value visualization and knowledge engineering.

Alessandro Bertoni is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Blekinge Institute of Technology (Sweden). He has been involved in a number of research projects at European and Swedish-national level in the area of system engineering and value driven design, mainly in collaboration with the aerospace industry. He is currently involved in two research projects concerning the development of model based decision support systems for engineering design practices. He is responsible for the courses of system engineering and product service systems design research at Blekinge Institute of Technology.

Ola Isaksson is since joining Chalmers in 2015 the chaired professor in systems engineering and engineering design at the Division of Product Development at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Sine earning his PhD from Luleå university 1999, he has a pararallel industrial and academic carrier within applied research. He has more than 20 years of experience from Aerospace industry, where he still holds an advisory position as senior expert in product development at GKN Aerospace Engine Systems in Sweden. He led the Value Driven Design initiatives in a sequence of FP6 and FP7 research initiatives in aeronautics. His research interest ranges broadly within engineering aspects of product development, including value driven development, knowledge based engineering, product-service systems development, platform based development and multi-disciplinary engineering. He currently leads a systems engineering design group at Chalmers, with tight collaboration with aerospace and transport manufacturing industries, both nationally in Sweden and internationally.

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Bertoni, M., Bertoni, A. & Isaksson, O. EVOKE: A Value-Driven Concept Selection Method for Early System Design. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 27, 46–77 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-016-5324-2

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