Strategic Research Agendas (SRA) bring to the research community a prospective and collective vision of a sector and are intended to provide directions for future research efforts. However, some promising innovative areas are not always foreseen in those documents, which raises the question of the relevance and adequacy of their coverage. While engineering design is often considered to translate SRA guidelines into product development, we believe it can also be of great help regarding the design of an SRA. In this paper, we will first address how to assess the scope of an SRA through a framework based on C-K theory, before exploring how to extend it, if need be. To answer those questions, we will examine a high-quality roadmap: the Electronic Components and Systems Strategic Research Agenda (ECS SRA). Our resulting method will provide us the means to assess SRA coverage and to ensure that interesting research areas are not forgotten unintentionally, in order to allow to a further enrichment of the document if needed.

In low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), diagnostics are not always available in remote areas. Hospitals and healthcare centres are often too far from the community, and waiting times are up to a few hours even for relatively simple procedures. Moreover, travelling to the healthcare centre and taking the diagnostic test is frequently unaffordable. Point of Care Tests (POCTs) can improve the availability, accessibility and affordability of the diagnostics by providing the test at the time and place of patient care. Although many POCTs have been developed already, there remain challenges to enable the healthcare workers (HCW) and the patients to use the device in practice. In this paper, we aim to provide a systemic overview of the barriers and opportunities for the adoption of use and acceptance of the results of POCTs based on the literature. The barriers and opportunities were clustered into six themes and used to draw out recommendations for the future design.

Science and technology generated by Universities has many challenges in reaching commercial product applications, as has been explored in a range of literature. Product design has been identified to add value through various types of contributions in addressing these challenges; however, there remains a gap in literature to explore how and when product development activities can practically be applied to technology development.

This paper furthers the idea that the product development process can help bridge the gap between the laboratory and commercial applications by proposing a framework for how Ulrich and Eppinger's product development process can integrate with the STAM technology development model. This is a significant step towards understanding how in practice these disciplines can work together to bring science and technology from the laboratory to products in the marketplace.

Caused by the technology of automated driving the user is temporarily released from driving and can perform non-driving-related tasks (NDRTs), such as sleeping or working. The aim of this paper is to describe the geometrical interdependencies between NDRTs and different vehicle types, to be able to integrate them in the geometric package of the early phase of the vehicle conception. To address the objective a literature based study of existing approaches for vehicle conception and NDRT-studies was carried out. Additionally interviews with n=15 experts from the automotive conception department and a databased analysis of n=259 vehicles was conducted. Based on these investigations 91 geometrical characteristics for NDRTs and vehicle types werde determined and combined through a matrix-based approach. By analysing the approach highly connected characteristics such as the torso angle were identified and equations were set up to describe the relations. The approach can be used for different NDRTs such as relaxing and working and different vehicle types such as sporty cars or SUVs in order to integrate them into the package.

Many cities have announced ambitious plans to introduce zero-emission electric bus systems. The transformation process to electric bus systems opens up a vast design space as different charging strategies, charging technologies and battery types are available. Therefore, a profound assessment strategy is necessary to find a “most suitable system solution” under given strategic and operational requirements.

In this study, we present a new methodology for conceptual design of urban electric bus systems. First, the available e-bus technologies are analysed with a special focus on charging systems, battery technology and aging. Relational functional analysis is used to derive a suitable simulation model. Based on the operational requirements, an energetic simulation of the e-bus is carried out, and the required battery capacity is obtained. Subsequently, the design space is reduced by applying a qualitative cost- technology compatibility matrix taking cost and battery aging into account. The applicability of the model is shown for an exemplary realistic operational scenario to identify three most expedient concepts, which are finally validated with an in-depth analysis.

In recent years, more and more technical systems dispose of some form of intelligence which allows to control and diagnose the processes and states in such systems. One important prerequisite for both control and diagnosis is monitoring, i.e. a systematic observation, surveillance or recording of entities of a technical product or its surroundings by any technical means. Current investigations were able to clarify that the design of a technical system can ease the control and diagnosis of this system. The same is true for monitoring; this fact will be demonstrated in this paper on the example of a research vehicle which is intended to foster the development of mapping systems and algorithms. In a sense, the main objective of this vehicle is also a kind of monitoring. Due to its unique design, this vehicle is able to navigate on all kind of terrains. It is equipped with several forms of sensors, which are consciously mounted at certain positions on the vehicle in order to allow a detailed detection of the surroundings. The investigation, how design can ease monitoring, was supported by a well-known model of product concretization and concrete insights could be found on all levels.

Car crash simulation analysis is an important phase within the vehicle development. It intends to analyse the crashworthiness of the vehicle model and examine the level of passive security. However, this activity is not trivial because of the considerable collaboration within the project, the large amount of analysed and exchanged data and a high exigency. Consequently, a solution to assist, ease and reduce the time of the process is desired.

To study the current practices followed in the car crash simulation analysis an empirical study has been conducted. This study has been applied within the simulation analysis team, in the development phase, within an automotive company. This paper describes a qualitative analysis of the industrial context and diagnoses the dysfunctions in the current practices. This paper also highlights the current challenges encountered in the car crash simulation analysis.

This paper describes an approach for designing an energy efficient motion and task scheduling for an autonomous vehicle which is moving in complicated environments in industrial sector or in large warehouses. The vehicle is requested to serve a number of workstations while moving safely and efficiently in the environment. In the proposed approach, the overall problem is formulated as a constraint optimization problem by using the Bump-Surface concept. Then, a Pareto-based multi- objective optimization strategy is adopted, and a modified genetic algorithm is developed to determine the Pareto optimum solution. The efficiency of the developed method is investigated and discussed through simulated experiments.

Structuring the early design phase of automotive systems is an important part of efficient and successful development processes. Today, safety considerations (e.g., the safety life cycle of ISO 26262) significantly affect the course of development. Preliminary designs are expressed in functional system architectures, which are required to form safety concepts. Thus, mapping tasks and work products to a reference process during early design stages is an important part of structuring the system development. This contribution describes the systematic creation and notation of the functional safety concept within the concept phase of development of an unmanned protective vehicle within the research project aFAS. Different stages of preliminary design and dependencies between them are displayed by the work products created and used. The full set of functional safety requirements and an excerpt of the safety argument structure of the SAE level 4 application are presented.

The paper presents a multidisciplinary design optimisation strategy for car front-end profile to minimise head injury criteria across pedestrian groups. A hybrid modelling strategy was used to simulate the car- pedestrian impact events, combining parametric modelling of front-car geometry with pedestrian models for the kinematics of crash impact. A space filling response surface modelling strategy was deployed to study the head injury response, with Optimal Latin Hypercube (OLH) Design of Experiments sampling and Kriging technique to fit response models. The study argues that the optimisation of the front-end car geometry for each of the individual pedestrian models, using evolutionary optimisation algorithms is not an effective global optimization strategy as the solutions are not acceptable for other pedestrian groups. Collaborative Optimisation (CO) multidisciplinary design optimisation architecture is introduced instead as a global optimisation strategy, and proven that it can enable simultaneous minimisation of head injury levels for all the pedestrian groups, delivering a global optimum solution which meets the safety requirements across the pedestrian groups.

The increasingly intelligent, highly complex, technical systems of tomorrow - for instance autonomous vehicles - result in the necessity for a systematic security- and safety-oriented development process that starts in the early phases of system design. Automotive Systems Engineering (ASE) as one approach is increasingly gaining ground in the automotive industry. However, this approach is still in a prototype stage. The consideration of security and safety within the early stages of systems design leads to so- called ill-defined problems. Such are not covered by ASE, but can be addressed by means of Design Thinking. Therefore we introduce an approach to combine both approaches. Based on this combination, we derive potentials in the context of the consideration of security and safety. Essential advantages are the possibility to think ahead of threat scenarios at an early stage in system design. Due to an incomplete database, this is not supported or only partially supported by conventional approaches. The resulting potentials are derived based upon a practical example.

The technological progress to automated driving not only influences the motion of the vehicle itself but also enables passengers to productively shape their driving time in a new way as they are not occupied with driving tasks anymore. Therefore, non-driving-related activities such as sleeping, working on a notebook or watching movies, become relevant user scenarios for functionally designing the automotive interior. For this purpose, a non-driving-related activity can be described by functions, which support the users in performing their intentional tasks, and functions carriers, which fulfil one or several functions. Basing on previous research findings, a quantitative survey is conducted in order to identify relevant and prioritised functions and function carriers. Five non-driving-related activities are taken into account: 'Making a call', 'sleeping', 'watching a movie', 'talking to passengers' and 'working on a notebook'. Results show a significant difference between general relevancy and specific prioritisation of functions and function carriers. In this contribution, the setup of the study is described, the outcome exemplified and further research steps are deduced.

The Life Cycle Energy Optimisation (LCEO) methodology aims at finding a design solution that uses a minimum amount of cumulative energy demand over the different phases of the vehicle's life cycle, while complying with a set of functional constraints. This effectively balances trade-offs, and therewith avoids sub-optimal shifting between the energy demand for the cradle-to-production of materials, operation of the vehicle, and end-of-life phases. The present work describes the extension of the LCEO methodology to perform holistic product system optimisation. The constrained design of an automotive component and the design of a subset of the processes which are applied to it during its life cycle are simultaneously optimised to achieve a minimal product system life cycle energy. A subset of the processes of the end-of-life phase of a vehicle's roof are modeled through a continuous formulation. The roof is modeled as a sandwich structure with its design variables being the material compositions and the thicknesses of the different layers. The results show the applicability of the LCEO methodology to product system design and the use of penalization to ensure solution feasibility.

The desire to combine advanced user-friendly interfaces with a product personality communicating environmental friendliness to customers poses new challenges for car interior designers, as little research has been carried out in this field to date. In this paper, the creation of three personas aimed at defining key German car users with pro-environmental behaviour is presented. After collecting ethnographic data of potential drivers through literature review, information about generation and Euro car segment led to the definition of three key user groups. The resulting personas were applied to determine the most important interaction points in car interior. Finally, present design cues of eco-friendly product personality developed in the field of automotive design were explored. Our work presents three strategic directions for the design development of future in-car user interfaces named as a) foster multimodal mobility; b) emphasize the interlinkage economy - sustainable driving; and c) highlight new technological developments. The presented results are meant as an impulse for developers to fit the needs of green customers and drivers when designing user-friendly HMI components.

Variety management is a cross-domain issue in product family design. In the real field, the relationships across the domains are so complex for most of the existing product families that they cannot be easily identified without proper reference architecture. This reference architecture should provide the cross- domain mapping mechanisms in an explicit manner and be able to identify the proper units for management. From this perspective of cross-domain framework, this paper introduces development architecture (DA) to describe the relationships between elements in market, design, and production domains and to give insights for the cross-domain variety management in the product development stage. DA has three parts: (1) the arrangement of elements in each domain, (2) the mapping between elements, and (3) the identification of management sets and key interfaces which are the proper units for variety management. The proposed development architecture framework is applied to the case of front chassis family of modules of an automobile.

This paper introduces a new method to help designers assess the impact of changes to a product platform when introducing a new variant. The method evaluates a platform design by investigating how changing some components will impact other platform design perspectives such as material, function, manufacturing processes and assembly time. To assess the usefulness of this method, it was applied to assess platform changes resulting from successive generations of scanner heads from two manufacturers. The method indicated that one manufacturer improved their scanner head design by improving the functionality of its components and assembly time. Whereas, the other manufacturer's new scanner head used more material and manufacturing processes without benefiting other design perspectives. Compared to existing product family evaluation methods which focus only on maximising commonality between product variants, the proposed method considers potential platform design improvements and assesses them from multiple design perspectives before deciding on reusing existing components or implementing the new design. The information from this method will also complement existing commonality indices.

Modularity is acknowledged to provide benefits across the whole product lifecycle. Accordingly, many literature contributions can be found about modularization methods, metrics and definitions. In particular, recent studies focused on the development of heuristic principles for exploiting modularity early in the design process. However, to design modules it is necessary to define their mutual interactions, the related interfaces and their production strategies. Concerning interfaces and interactions, this paper highlights that current definitions are often ambiguous and overlapping each other. Therefore, extracting univocal information about interfaces and interactions of existent modular products could be difficult. This could hinder the identification of comprehensive heuristic design guidelines, about how to design modules from a structural point of view. This paper proposes a new set of interface and interaction definitions, which allows to overcome the flaw observed for current ones. The proposed set and the classical one have been applied on 110 products identified on the web, showing that the new definitions allow to extract more reliable information.

In product family design, the commonality of products and performance are competing objectives when designers build platforms. The commonality makes it efficient to manufacture products while it will cause performance loss of products. In this paper, we assume that performance functions evaluate the performance of a product. Targets of performance functions are set for each product depending on the product's property. The designs that satisfy the target of performance functions are denoted as ‘good’ design points. By using ‘good’ design points, a weighted set cover problem (WSC) is applied to formulate the combinatorial optimization problem, which maximizes the commonality by minimizing the number component attributes. A recursive greedy algorithm is proposed to handle the general cost function in the problem for product family design. The formulation and the algorithm are tested for a linear three-degree-of-freedom (3DOF) model. In numerical experiment, the proposed method determines optimal values of the components which are suspensions, stabilizer bars, and tires in the vehicle model.

In recent years, the air transport market has quickly grown, creating new civil aircrafts demand, challenging the actual production rate of aerospace industries. The bottleneck of the current civil aircrafts production rate lies in the capability of the manufacturing and assembly facilities in relation to the aircrafts architecture design.

The aim of this work is to develop a methodology and a related mathematical model that can be used at the conceptual design phase for the assessment of criticalities related to the product assemblability. The methodology allows to recognize modules and/or interfaces which are mostly affecting the assembly time providing a design tool for the comparison and evaluation of product architecture alternatives.

A preliminary application has been done on the nose-fuselage of a civil aircraft for passenger transport. The test case provides interesting outcome in the identification of modules and module interfaces which are strongly affecting the assembly phase and required a re-arrangement (new architecture design) for the process improvement.

As todays’ global market trends lead to an increasing demand for individualised products, manufacturers need to cope with a high degree of internal and external variety, which has a severe impact on complexity and therefore -costs. When implementing modular product architectures, it becomes obvious, that the actual Engineer-to-Order (ETO) processes cannot cope with the requirements of such a product architecture. It is crucial to develop a complying Configure-to-Order (CTO) process in order to make full use of its suppled benefits. As there is no existing approach about how to methodically change an existing ETO process into an adequate CTO process, we intend to fill this gap with this paper by showing an approach for the development of a CTO process for modular product architectures. Furthermore, we show the application and evaluation of this approach in a case study with a special equipment manufacturer (SME), that is already implementing modular architectures.