A Collaborative Scheme for DFX Techniques in Concurrent Engineering Mitigated with Total Design Activity Model

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has sparked rapid changes in the manufacturing and construction sectors, leading to a significant shift in how off-site factory-based panelized construction machines are designed and manufactured. Concurrent engineering which seeks to close the gap between design and manufacturing sectors provides an ideal environment for machine development. It is a systematic methodology to integrate machines holistic concurrent design activities and their related processes. Competition arising in the marketplace for newly developed machines is driving modifications in the way machine designers develop production machines. Thus, to boost the efficiency in concurrent machine development, appropriate evaluation, and decision analysis tools required to be developed and utilized. Currently, there is no DFX selection tool available to aid the designer in concurrent machine design applications. In this paper, these challenges are addressed through a comprehensive qualitative literature review of DFX techniques with their implementation in Stuart Pugh: Total Design Activity Model. Various DFX techniques are mapped and clustered in a collaborative scheme, interactions and links between them are identified, and the relative importance weight of each is calculated. A description of a functional DFX scheme is proposed in this paper that can aid designers in establishing lean design processes for machine development and reveals its potential application in Multi-DFX fuzzy multi-criteria decision-support system.