Today's manufacturing has become global at all aspects of marketing, design, production, distribution, etc. While product family design has been an essential viewpoint for meeting with the demand for product variety, its meaning is becoming more broad and complicated with linking product design with issues on market systems, supply chain, etc. This paper calls such design situations 'global product family design,' and develops a mathematical model for the simultaneous decision problem of module commonalization strategies under a given architecture and supply chain configuration through selection of manufacturing sites for module production, assembly and final distribution as an instance of the problems. This paper demonstrates some numerical case studies for ascertaining its validity and promise with an optimization method configured with a genetic algorithm and a simplex method.

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Toward the digitalization of product development process to vitalize the Japanese strength of design and manufacturing, the importance of process study by the criteria of digital data and the factors to consider based on characteristics of PLM tools were revealed, In this report, the study of the product development process in the view point of differences/characteristics for expected mass production products and products to order individual production. In the midst of globalization in the future, in order to vitalize the Japanese strength of design and manufacturing, the ICT system demonstrated by the need to build with the architecture "EPIA(Engineering Process Integrated Architecture)" which enables spiral up the process from the upstream design to downstream the manufacturing by the consistent information coordination.

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A rocket engine that the proposed method was applied to, completed the combustion tests satisfied the specified performance in a very short development period without any major problems despite the brand-new development. This report describes the results and effects brought by the proposed method.

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We have suggested a new design and development methodology called Total Design Management (TDM) with "Set Based Design (SBD)" for a multi-objective trade-off design and "Model based Risk management (MBR)" for a risk management in previous papers. After that several on-site designers tried to design for their each object with TDM. Actually they used TDM for a multi-objective trade-off design and a risk management, and also for a project management tool and technology transfer tool. In this paper, we describe how TDM is used at the design site, and what on-site designer expects to TDM applied.

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We suggest a new design methodology for value creation design, which expands a multi-objective trade-off design and a risk management, called Total Design Management (TDM). Value of the product is mostly determined at the upstream design stage. Value creation design method of TDM is designed to satisfy the requirements of customers, and adopt an original concept of new design. Novel proposed method provides design method which can find a new value.

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A quality of a design result in the early stage of the product development is very important, because it has high impact on the basic and detailed design stage. However, especially in the early stage, the problem structure and kind is often not defined yet. This research focuses on the problem definition in the early design stage. Using product function and product structure, a system approach to declare the problem in product design is proposed in this paper. Two design example is examined by proto-type system; (1) an electric fan system and (2) large-scaled integrated circuit (system LSI). In conclusion, the possibility of deriving product constraints by grouping the dependencies defined inside the product model.

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In recent years, developing various types of products in a short design lead-time is needed to satisfy consumers' needs. In this study, a method to support expansion of design requirements using product cases is proposed. In preceding manuscript, framework for expansion of design requirements was proposed based on survey of study about design concept process and analysis of design experiment protocol. The framework is decomposed into processes as follows; collect product cases based on keyword given by the designer, screening of the collected cases, extraction of elements contained in the cases based on the result of screening, and decision to adopt extracted element to requirement of the current design. On the extraction process, entity, function, and attribute elements are extracted. In this manuscript, criterion for extraction of elements and supports to determine range of attribute's value is proposed. Then, the proposed system was developed and case studies are done using the system.

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As complexity of products increased, management of development project becomes difficult. For better management of product development projects, this paper proposes an integrated model of product and process information. Most information on a proposed model is described as Multi Domain Matrices (MDM). Further, to overcome a difficulty of acquiring information, this paper proposes methodologies for model based assistance for information refinement. Then, computational methods to utilize acquired model is discussed. The proposed methods employ technics on DSM and DMM to deliberate possible candidates of development process, incorporating manageability of design process and resource allocation. As a result, it provides project managers with arena to discuss how to co-ordinate product development process.

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As products become increasingly complex, concomitantly management of development process becomes challenging. Even though there are several computational models which lead to co-ordination of design process, they still have limited implementations, as perspectives these method incorporate are quite limited. This paper suggests the method to incorporate organizational capabilities and organization structure as perspectives in co-ordination of design process. Furthermore, the proposed method also refers to organization structure design, because changing design process sometimes comes with changing structure of organization.

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The importance of flexible and optimal planning of engineering design process is increasingly recognized in today's competitive environment. Because a product consists of a lot of subsystems, an engineering design process consists of two different activities, i.e., an activity to enhance the technical performance level of each subsystem, and an activity to enhance the integrity among the subsystems. When considering the limitation of resources, there is a trade-off between the achievement probabilities of those activities. This paper proposes a new optimization method of design process planning that aims at a Pareto-optimal achievement of individual technical performances and total product integrity. A planning of design process is a complicated optimization problem including a number of various design variables and various evaluation indices. In order to solve this problem with a reasonable computation cost, this research separates the optimization problem into two sub problems, i.e., (i) defining of process architecture and organization structure and (ii) scheduling of resource allocation into activities. A growth curve model with a fuzzy number is used to evaluate the achievement probability of technical performance and its total integrity. This paper demonstrates its application to a student design project. A proposed optimization method facilitates a project manager to explore various process plans, to assess their risks, and decide a temporary plan.

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Corrugated sheets have been used in various applications where lightweight and high bending stiffness have been required. However, they have limited their usefulness due to their extreme anisotropic bending stiffness. I developed isotropic patterned shell structures which had the high second moment of area in arbitrary cross sectional dimensions in the previous report. FEM and experimental results indicated that the developed shell structures made the weight of sheets less than half under the equivalent bending stiffness condition. Until now, the optimal design to maximize their bending stiffness has not been made clear yet. In this paper, new patterned shell structures are created by improving conventional pattern of the previous report to increase the bending stiffness.

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It is difficult for the hemiplegic patients to move the side of the body paralyzed due to apoplexy. And they need to recover their motor function through a course of rehabilitations. While, the wheelchair is used as a self-supported transfer by the hemiplegic patients. It is likely to driven by the healthy side on their own. However, if the hemiplegic patients continue to drive the wheelchair by limbs on the healthy side, the muscular force of the affected side will be weakened with a risk of a slow recovery. In this paper, we design and manufacture the wheelchair that gives the paralyzed limbs gait training motion for hemiplegic patient. This gait training motion is generated by the healthy side as driving wheelchair. Giving the repeated motion to the affected side, the wheelchair is expected to bring an effective rehabilitation. We measure the angular displacement of hip joint and knee joint and examine the effect of the wheelchair.

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This paper discusses on the design issues in an autonomous snow eater robot. Our design purpose is a small and light mechanism for the robot, which helps the snow removing task in residences of snowy areas. Based on the performance evaluation in the prototype robot, screw layout in the sweeper mechanism is modified with the purpose of a low snow pressure during the snow removal task. A height control unit for the screw shaft position is additionally developed in order for the altitude control on the snow covered ground. Improvements in the modified mechanism are shown by drawings and pictures.

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Recently, many types assist devices are developed. However, because a lot of developed assist devices are using the actuators and control systems, and these devices rise the cost and increase in size. Therefore, it is difficult for a general person to use it. Then, in this paper the assist device of hip joint is developed and produced. It is enabled to wear it readily by using the link mechanics like a supporter. Moreover, the device is used in the hip joint and the angular displacement is measured and the angular velocity and the angular acceleration are calculated and the performance is evaluated when walking.

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"Idea design and production contest" is the group work carried out in Yamagata University. This group work is one of study themes within the PBL-type educational program named "Design of Engineering", and executed since 2004. The groups of students try to design and produce the machine to compete keeping regulation. Students cultivate their independency, planning quality, cooperativeness and fundamental ability of mechanical engineering by practical design and production of machine. The competition is quite effective to keep motivation of students.

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It is pointed out that we will have to move toward self developing economy from the current commodity economy with increasing globalization, because the current economy system would call for large consumption of energy and that we would no more afford it. If we could create value in the process, the whole economic system would change from the current product based one. Such an example is Web 2.0, where there is no role distinction and everybody enjoys being a member of the game. Design education must be changed so that it will adapt to such a change.

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The current issues in engineering design are pointed out. Current engineering design is carried out for individual product. But increasing diversification and complexity call for product design as part or element of society. Thus, more holistic approach is needed. Automotive vehicles need to be developed considering environment, energy, communication, etc beyond just means of transportation. To carry out such design, horizontal expansion and reverse development should be more pursued. Such an approach would also serve for Bottom of the Pyramid business.

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Although creativity education is important, there can be skeptical opinions against current creativity education. In this paper, the author discusses the possibility of systematic creativity education by dividing creativity into four elements: potential idea, idea exposure, planning and execution.

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This paper describes education support system for mechatronics using marker free augmented reality technology. The system aims to offer useful information for the learner, to support intuitive study, and to improve the efficiency of the in-depth understanding and study. For the purpose the system that synthesizes information that seems to improve study to the image of the reality on real time was developed using marker free augmented reality technology to mechatronics training, and study. The education support system haves function to show explanation and datasheet of parts of the mechatronics system for learner when the learner click the parts through the display and to show circuit diagram on real image at leaner's request.

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Recently, a new academic field, "service engineering" has been very actively investigated. However, there are few effective methods and tools to simulate and evaluate services designed based on the concept of service engineering. In the past, the authors proposed a service flow simulation method using scene transition nets (STNs) which is a graphic modeling and simulation method for discrete-continuous hybrid systems. However, this method does not consider how to model and simulate complex service flows including multiple layered, parallel, and interrupted structures and it is difficult to construct STN models of such complex systems using the existing STN concepts. In this paper, the authors propose a new STN modeling method using "multi-aspect STN modeling" concepts in order to provide easy methods for modeling of such complex services. The experimental results for the modeling and simulation of a nursing service demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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The variability of service quality caused by the uncertainties which is involved service components and events. In order to realize services with stable quality, it is important to extract the uncertainties of service components and events and then, clarify and reduce the factors of variability. In this paper, we propose a worksheet for supporting the extraction uncertainty elements and a procedure for analyzing the uncertainty based on a worksheet and service models which express the service realization structure and delivery process.

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Services include various uncertainties. Especially, service failures from service providers in service processes, which can be categorized as the uncertainties, have enormous amount of negative influence on costs of services. It is difficult for service designers to figure out the costs of services considering such uncertainties by simple numerical calculations. It is necessary to model various uncertainties and to simulate services cost in consideration of the uncertainties. In this study, the authors develop a service process simulator using scene transition nets (STNs) considering service failures of providers in service processes. We propose a modeling and simulation method to construct models of the service failures using service FTA and to estimate the providers' working time that impacts heavily on costs of services.

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In Service Engineering, a service is represented as a functional structure that satisfies customer requirements and these functions are realized by functions carriers. Entities as functions carriers could be very diverse, since they include both physical products and human resources. It is therefore not easy for designers to design functions carriers. Authors have constructed the knowledge base to provide function carriers alternatives and proposed a method to support service design with the knowledge base. However it depends on designers' ability to choose appropriate function carriers as a design solution from several kinds of functions carriers provided from knowledge base. This paper aims to propose the decision-making supporting method to choose appropriate function carriers.

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In service design, it is important to use the knowledge of various areas effectively. Authors have proposed a method to acquire the design knowledge from Web which includes a large amount of information, and a method to use it for service design. It is confirmed that providing a large amount of knowledge is useful for service design, however, on the other hand, a large amount of knowledge place a burden on designers. In this paper, to manage a large amount of knowledge, we propose a method for service design knowledge extraction using design management tags.

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In Service Engineering, a design methodology of services based on customer requirements is proposed. However, due to the fact that customer wants and needs are becoming further diversified, it is still difficult to establish a design method to customize a service to satisfy various customer requirements concurrently. "Mass-Customization" is an effective way to solve the problem. The purpose of this study is to propose a design method to realize Mass-Customization of services. In this paper, case analysis is conducted to clarify structural characteristics of Mass-Customized services.

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In service design, a broad range of knowledge must be needed for service designers. In the actual service field, however, service design relies on the designers' own knowledge, experiences, and intuition. To tackle this issue, the authors have proposed the basic policy to establish the function embodiment knowledge base, in which sets of function and its realization structure (entities and delivery process) are collected. In this paper, the service design catalogue, which is used to provide the accumulated knowledge to a service designer, is proposed. Then, on the basis of this scheme, the service design support system is developed.

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A service ontology contributes to service modeling, model sharing and service design. In this paper, we discuss our service ontology and its basic idea. Firstly, we propose our definition of service with the comparison to product function. It is important to understand the distinctions between notions to develop ontologies. However, the distinction between service and product function is not clear in previous research. Secondly, we formalize our conceptualization of service based on a role theory, which is one of the most fundamental issues in ontology engineering. Based on the role theory, we propose an ontological model of service which is more precise than that in our previous work. Lastly, we explain the overview of our service ontology and the core concepts.

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In conceptual design phase, According paying attention to specific design objectives, designers sometimes avoid to get various ideas about new product. On the other hand, using brainstorming allows to get various ideas, but it causes a problem to obtain a lot of unavailable ideas together. In this study, to support generating various and effective ideas in conceptual design, we propose a conceptual design support method applying Data Envelopment Analysis and TRIZ. We proposed the method using several evaluation values to fill the gap of pareto frontier and creating hierarchy graphs. In this study, we propose the method using TRIZ at the Brain Storming stage in addition to the our proposed method. Various information is given to the designer from hierarchy relation graphically and TRIZ when they conceive new ideas. We verified which technique is effective to obtain new ideas with high evaluation by comparing these two methods. The result shows that the proposed method using TRIZ is more efficient than the other way not using TRIZ.

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This paper describes modification method which satisfies the design conditions such as strength. In the past study, we proposed a system for deriving diverse solutions which has two processes. We generated diverse forms in the first process and derived diverse solutions by structure optimization to each forms in the second process. In structural design, evaluation items such as mechanical characteristics are the important factors, and solutions which satisfy the value of evaluation items become applicable solution. The diversity of applicable solutions decreases comparing with derived all solutions. Most of solutions which are not applicable are geometrically novel in form characteristic. It can be inferred that if we can modify these forms to applicable solutions, the diversity of applicable solutions would increase. Therefore, we propose a modification method which satisfies the evaluation standard by increasing and decreasing elements and apply the method to not applicable solutions and possibility of increasing the diversity of solutions is shown by using this method.

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Today's industrial products are sometime designed by inspiration from nature. The observations of the nature bring us fruitful ideas such as like echolocation in bats, fabric which emulates shark sin, and so on. For mechanical product development, structural optimization is very important because it determines product cost, weight, and fuel consumption. Hence, a concept generation method of topological structure is highly desired. This research hypothesis that bionmimicry may also contribute to generate the design concepts of topological structure. TRIZ is one of the famous design support method in concept design stage. TRIZ provides the design support in the problem definition and solving process. This paper proposes a biomimicric design support method based on TRIZ. The concept generation of topological structure has not been scientifically studied in the literature. In this work, the design principles and design processes of the topological structure are proposed based on a throughout observation of the nature animals, insects, and plants. We use an inductive approach to gather and study the weight saving techniques. The natural analogies considering weight saving is found and categorized. Based on the categorized analogies, this paper proposes a design process to apply the biomimicric weight saving idea. Based on the nature observation, the authors categorized five weight saving principles and facilitators. The principles and facilitators are proposed based on gathering and searching the analogies. The proposed design method provides the more concepts of the topological structures in the early design stage.

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Emergence is a phenomenon that a set of agents which obeying with simple rules locally generates interpretive global structures, which is not predictable from these rules. In the context of engineering design, concept of emergence is often referred to as generator of striking designs, which are new and innovative. In this paper, a research made by authors will be argued. First past research results are reviewed briefly followed by its one of expected application example: electronic sketchbook. Although it is just a conceptual proposal and doesn't have real substance, it is a nice example of showing flexibility and plasticity of computation system of emergence. Next, a crucial issue of calculation scheme defined by the past research will be stated and future research plan that resolve the issue will be considered. It will be argued that a lack of capability considering dynamic behaviors among agents in the current scheme is seemed to be source of less-performance for generating novel solutions, which commonly expected. And plan of introducing a co-evolution mechanism into current scheme will be considered. In the co-evolution model, current static Euler description of field will be coupled with a dynamic Lagrangian system of agents, and this will be further flexibility and dynamic behavior of computation. Finally, brief conclusion summarizes this paper.

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The requirement definition and conceptual design phases significantly change the direction of product attraction. These phases depend heavily on the creativity of the designer or development team. For support of idea creation process, we have proposed Function Synthesis Approach (FSA) using combination of Particles method (inventive problem solving method) and Particle Swarm Optimization method (Evolutionary algorithm). In this paper, pre/post-processing methods are proposed to improve the FSA. The knowledge about which it might argue based on the result is reported.

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Attractive products are changed significantly by requirement definition and conceptual design phase. Quality of product concept, which is result of these phases, depends heavily on creativity of designer or development team. Therefore, it is difficulty that computer-aided system supports a creative and inventive thinking process, to search a creative design solution. To overcome its difficulty, we developed the Function Synthesis Approach (FSA) which combined the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm and the Particles Method of Unified Structured Inventive Thinking (USIT) for supporting to top-down thinking in problem solving process. In this paper, we introduce Use Case Point method to evaluate the output of the FSA. We generalized the Use Case Point method for introduction in FSA. The knowledge about which it argue based on the result is reported.

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In this paper, a method of automatic controller design for electronic control systems considering for disturbance is described. In order to automate the design of the electronic controller, an evolutionary computation is applied. First, the framework for applying the genetic algorithm to the automation of controller design is described. In particular, the coding of a chromosome is shown in detail. Then, how to make a fitness function is represented, with an inverted pendulum as an example, and the controller of the inverted pendulum is developed automatically using our proposed framework. Finally, an evolutionary simulation is performed to confirm our framework.

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The understanding of individual movement in a given space is important in many areas such as geography, architecture and city planning. With recent advances in sensor and computing technology, trajectory data, series of coordinate data with timing, can be readily obtained and used to help us understand the characteristics of the space. However, the interpretation of patterns becomes difficult as the number of paths increases with the number of individuals examined. In this study, we intends to contribute to the development of a schematic landscape diagram of the space-time paths for movement analysis by firstly observing individual activities in an office and collecting trajectory data, and secondly developing a framework for the landscape diagram and analyzing the trajectory data to extract the tendency of the movement. Here, the interpretation of the patterns of trajectories becomes accurate as the number of trajectories increases. Finally, we argue that this is an effective way to understand the characteristics of the space.

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We propose a design parametrization method using Principal Component Analysis. In view of shape optimization, design parametrization strongly affects the optimal solution. Our method can represent shapes which are defined by different kinds of parametrization methods and other freeform curves.

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In this research, we introduce a novel method to analyze the axial compression analysis of thin circular shell structures. employing a new analysis framework, called isogeometric analysis, which is based on NURBS surfaces We generate the thin circular shell structures by first designing the profile curve with prescribed positions, normals and curvatures at a number of points using the geometric interpolation algorithm, then generating the NURBS surface by revolving the profile curve.

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In the current highway design, a center curve of a highway is designed in three steps. In the first step the projection of the center curve onto the horizontal plane is designed with planar curves, i.e. x=x(t), y=y(t) consisting of straight lines, circular arcs, and clothoid curves. Secondly, the elevation z=z(t) is designed separately. Finally, the super elevation, which is the tilting of the road to account for the centripetal forces as the vehicle goes around a curve, is considered. Therefore, the resulting 3D curve may pass through the desired positions and tangents, however, in general, it does not have the correct normal and binormal vectors. In this research, we introduce a new method to generate the center curve with correct positions, tangents and curvature vectors at the input positions. Then, the section curves are generated along the normal vector at each input position, and blended together to form a lofted surface.

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In this paper, we propose a novel method for approximating a set of scattered data points by a quadrilateral mesh using level set methods followed by geometric algorithms. The level set method is used to capture the topology of the point clouds, and the geometric algorithm using Catmull-Clark subdivision surface is employed to generate high quality meshes. Finally the Catmull-Clark control mesh is converted to B-spline representation. The reconstructed models of topologically complex models show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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Demand for power saving of data centers in Japan becomes higher owing to the electric power shortage after the Tohoku Earthquake. Consolidation of the workload into a smaller number of computing resources by VM migration and turning servers on and off as needed are very effective to save the total power consumption of data center. However the power switching control of servers is not directly applied to almost any current data center because of the risk of SLA(service level agreement) violation. To keep SLA, verification, covering all possible situations, is needed, and it can be done only by precise and realistic simulation of data center. In this paper, we propose a data center simulator which emulates the whole data center including all IT instruments of servers, storages as well as switches etc., and non IT instruments such as cooling and power devices as well as lighting system. Based on this simulator, we can precisely examine almost any realistic scenario of data center resource management such as optimized VM allocation and migration coupled with facility cooling control, aiming at the pursuit of minimum power consumption of the whole data center compatible with SLA.

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In this paper, we present a new model reduction approach to thermo fluid simulation, enabling large, real-time, detailed thermal flows with continuous user interaction. Our method is ideally suited for real-time simulation of high-resolution thermal fluid dynamics because our simulator is still fast even in the case of large problems expressed by using more than one million meshes. Our results indicate that one thousand times faster simulation can retain same level of accuracy as current methods. In addition, our method provides continuous user interaction in real-time. It allows that we can immediately assess how thermal field changes when controlling air-conditioning equipment in a data center.

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We have developed a modeling technique for an acoustic noise simulation for servers, which is a part of our simulation hub system to make iterative multi-domain simulations more efficient. A SEA (Statistical Energy Analysis) method is effective for a noise simulation for servers, but now there is not an automatic modeling technique for the SEA. This paper presents the technique to generate the SEA model from a 3-D assembly model.

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In this paper, the machine design efficiency improvement by CAD data effective use is described through the case with the design knowledge acquisition and the design knowledge use from the market information. The product development is work to add necessary information continuously in the each stage of work from the specification to the product launch. In addition, after the product launch, the evaluation and breakdown information on the commodity are added. It is necessary to secure enough information, and it makes to the design knowledge analyzing information, and to use the design knowledge so that these information is made the best use of for the product for the next term as design knowledge in the product development process. The design knowledge formed with breakdown information in the market was maintained by organically uniting three dimension CAD data (composition between parts and shape) and the design intention and the functional blocks, and the design knowledge was able to be buried under three dimensions CAD.

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