It is quite important, in industrial communities, to design devices in order to let them have required abilities. The design process is, however, time-consuming since the classical design process requires a lot of trial and error process. To overcome this difficulty, we sometimes use topology optimization, which is considered as the most flexible computer-aided design method. In the previous study, we have proposed a topology optimization with the fast multipole boundary element method (FMBEM) for acoustic devices in 3D. The proposed method is, however, insufficient for practical use since the method deals only with rigid scatterer. In order to enhance the applicability of our method, in this paper, we present a topology optimization method with the FMBEM for 3D-acoustics with impedance boundary condition. A detailed derivation of the topological derivative for the problem and algorithm of the topology optimization, along with some numerical examples which verify the correctness of the proposed method, are presented.

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Payload fairing of space rocket is excited by extremely high acoustic pressure over 150 dB when it is lift off, and equipped structures are also excited by the acoustic pressure field inside fairing. To secure tolerance for the failure of the structures, sound pressure level around them must be reduced. This paper proposes a design method to find the optimal layout of sound-absorbing material in order to minimize sound pressure level inside payload fairing by topology optimization. Numerical examples verified the proposed method gives physically acceptable results.

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This paper presents a topology poptimization method for fluid dynamics problems, based on the level set method and using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The LBM is a new approach for calculating viscous fluid behavior that replaces the classical formulation employing the Navier-Stokes equation. We inprove the optimization method which Yaji and others suggested, introduce the linear interpolation boundary condition into boundaries between fluid and solid domains. In this way. even few elements can perform good analysis of the precision, and it is excpected that memory and calculation time are reduced. Through a numerical example, we have confirmed the efficiency of the proposed method.

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Porous material has a lot of kinds according to hole size and difference of engaged condition of holes. These characteristics concern in structural characteristic like thermal conductivity characteristics and stiffness. However, artificial design method of porous materials has not established. As optimal design method, topology optimization has most flexibility among structural optimization. This research designs optimal hole shape of Porous material using topology optimization in relation to thermal conductivity characteristics and stiffness. Then, this research tries to develop of material that has new structural characteristic.

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Topology optimization is one approach of structural optimization, where various and complex shape can be represented. Because of its degree of freedom, topology optimization has potential to yield superior designs compared with sizing and shape optimizations. However, grayscale elements are often yielded, especially, in density based topology optimization methods; they influence negatively on design problems where Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed on design boundary. To achieve grayscale-free topology optimization, we proposed to use the level-set method and the zero-level boundary tracking mesh in previous studies. The zero-level boundary tracking mesh is a conformed mesh to the zero iso-contour of the level-set function and it is generated from the Eulerian mesh. In our previous studies, only the two-dimensional problem were targeted. In this study, we propose a new mesh generation method for the three-dimensional zero-level boundary tracking mesh and construct a grayscale-free topology optimization method for three-dimensional problem.

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This paper proposes a level-set based structural optimization method considering the minimum length constraint. The minimum length constraint should be considered in an engineering view point, because extreme thin parts are not preferable when processing structures. In the proposed level-set based method, the minimum length of the target structure can be easily computed by utilizing the characteristic of the signed distance function, although it is difficult in standard topology optimization methods. Furthermore, the modification method for the violation of the minimum length constraint can be easily implemented by the characteristic the signed distance function. Among many application fields for the proposed method, we now focus on a complaint mechanism design problem. Since thin hinge parts are appeared in normal compliant mechanisms, it is expected that unique designs for compliant mechanisms are obtained by constraining the minimum length. For this purpose, we develop a new level-set based structural optimization method for the compliant mechanism design problem where the minimum length is constrained. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated by some numerical examples.

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In this paper, we present a parameter-free free-form optimization method for the reaction force control problem of a shell structure with material and geometrical nonlinearities. The sum of squared error norms to a specified force is minimized subject to a volume constraint. The optimum design problem is formulated as a distributed-parameter shape optimization problem under the assumptions that a shell is varied in the out-of-plane direction to the surface and the thickness is constant. The shape gradient function and the optimality conditions for this problem are theoretically derived by using the material derivative method and the Lagrange multiplier method. The shape gradients derived are applied to the H^1 gradient method for shells with this method. The optimal shape of shell structures can be obtained without the shape parameterization, while maintaining the surface smoothness. The shape gradient function was calculated by a user sub-program which is developed by using the result of non-linear FEM analysis of a commercial solver (e.g. Nastran). Several calculated examples are presented to verify the validity and practical utility of the proposed methodology and the developed system.

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This paper discusses an optimization-based design approach for product platform for industrial three-axis linear-type robots, which are used for carrying objects in manufacturing lines. Since specifications of those robots are varied due to operation conditions such as operation speed, distance and orientation, weight and shape of objects, etc., the concept of product platform, that some key elements are commonly used across a series of products and they are customized for individual requirements, is promising for efficiently and effectively meeting with market needs. This paper proposes an optimization-based fundamental framework toward product platform design of the industrial three-axis linear-type robots. That is, this paper proposes an optimal design method of fundamental features of robot frames that are used commonly used for a wide range of robots. Some case studies of optimal platform design of industrial three-axis linear-type robots are demonstrated by applying a genetic algorithm to such mathematical models.

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A product family strategy is a way to cope with ever divergent market needs while enjoying efficiency in developments and productions. A product family strategy could be seen as determination of modular division structure of products and module communization structure within multiple products, which leads to competitiveness owing to efficient use of resources such as engineers and production lines. As the determination of product family structure involves rather large scale organizational changes, cautious planning is required. However, success of a product family strategy is affected by many aspects of the company, such as organizational structure. Thus the decision making is complex and difficult. This paper proposes a method to explore possible product family architectures that incorporates effect of organizational structure. The proposed method makes use of product models and an organization model. The product model captures functional architecture of the product in question while the organization model captures hierarchical structure of decision makings. Based on the proposed model, 4 evaluation criteria are introduced. A case study on a solar boat product line hs been conducted to verify the validity of the proposed method.

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In designing complex engineered systems, various experiments and simulations are needed for the verification of design hypotheses. Because the conducted verification is multidisciplinary, synthesis of these verification results should be based on a neutral model regarding the domains and disciplines. This paper introduces a metamodel, to which the roles and designers' intentions (i.e., design situation) of various verification models are referred, and uses it for analyzing the synthesis process. The design of a paper-handling device is used for an analysis example, which clarifies advantages and drawbacks in modeling the synthesis process with such a metamodel.

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Adequate optimization formulation and algorithm choices are essential for successful optimal design of a multi-disciplinary system. Details of such process remain with the realm of tacit experimental knowledge and skills of engineers. The future goal of our research is to build a descriptive management method that facilitates explicit description of experimental knowledge of engineers. This paper aims at clarifying an acquisition process of experimental knowledge in optimal design of a multi-disciplinary system. An experimental design optimization of a desiccant air system is performed to capture the process. Some typical process patterns are formalized based on the analysis of the captured process. This paper also discusses a vision for the descriptive management.

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Long-lifecycle system such as ship and plant undergoes many changes throughout their entire lifecycle. These changes force systems to become inefficient or even inoperative. Likewise, future changes lead to challenges that have to be met within the design of system. Consequently, long-lifecycle system strongly requires the ability to be changed easily/rapidly in response to change request and being adaptable to changing environments. This research aims to support for product design in early stage that enables to minimize the lifecycle cost. Changeability of system provides the convenience of counteract future changes and long-term operation. To evaluate changeability, we tried to trace change propagation and specify the area effected by change request. However, in some cases, increasing changeability leads to inefficiency. Thus, design for changeability requires considering future changes that are planed or expected. This research adopted the form of scenarios for describing future changes. As mentioned above, this study tried to develop the method of product design that enables to respond to future change in early stage. And we implemented it as a prototype system and evaluated the proposed method by a case study.

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In the early stage of the development process, designers propose and verify product concepts by means of experiments and calculations from various perspectives. The process is not solely deductive, but assumptions regarding the attributes of product concepts such as shapes, mechanisms, and material properties in order to effectively advance the verification process. This paper proposes a method to consider such assumptions made on the model of a product concept for the simulation of the concept verification process. The method helps designers understand how particular assumptions influence the progress and resulting cost of the verification process.

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In recent years, product systems are large-scale and complex. Accordingly, optimum design is difficult and development time is long. To solve such problems, SDSI (System Design System Integration)-Cubic has been proposed. This is a framework using a parametric model unified, and performs optimally designed automatically on the computer. SDSI-Cubic is based on the system model defined in SysML (System Modeling Language). Therefore, the system model is necessary to describe all of the design information on the evaluation and optimization of the target system. So, we have been studying how to write SysML for SDSI-Cubic. However, depending on the shape of the design plan, each parametric model to evaluate the non-functional requirements of the optimization is greatly changed. And to write all model by conventional method takes long time. In this paper, we examined the suitable parametric model to evaluate the non-functional requirements associated with the system shape.

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Japan was one of the leading nations of the technology developed by comparing and adjusting design which solves the problem in adjustment by designers together. Currently, mechatronics products are accounted for manufacturing market in the world. Functional failure are occurring and increasing by the difficulty of the software with the rapid complication of product function. Since the comparing and adjusting design method based on existing way is failing to keep pace with sophisticated features, in brief the occurrence of rework is the cause at downstream of the design process. Therefore, conceptual design in the upstream stage is important; the authors propose the Integrated physical simulation method, have carried out a design support by stepwise refinement of complex product design. However, the Integrated physical simulation method is performed support of software mainly. Therefore, the authors provide support for hardware by stepwise refinement physics simulations and applied to the chassis design in this paper.

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In automobiles, Radiation and convection of heat due to disturbance such as sunlight is stronger than indoor environment. The thermal environment in automobiles is non-uniform and locally inhomogeneous thermal environment. Therefore, local thermal environment evaluation is important for evaluating the thermal environment in automobiles. So we aim to evaluate local thermal environment by analysis of brain activity. And the final goal is development of the air conditioning control system using the results. In this paper, we describe analysis of brain activity during local cold stimulus. In our experiments, we measured oxyHb in the prefrontal cortex and the primary somatesthic cortex during subject' finger touch different temperature aluminum plates. The results reveal that oxyHb change in left hemisphere near parietal region of the brain by large temperature difference.

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In today's market, points of contact between users and products now extend to pre-product release situations such as rollout events. In order to design an attractive product that exceeds user's expectations, it is necessary to take into account a set of cognitive processes associated with the user experience, such as product expectations and the memories of product-related experiences that led to the formation of these expectations. This study aimed to model the situation surrounding users' expectations and to elucidate the mechanisms regulating these expectations. To do so, situations in which expectations arise were experimentally reproduced, participants predicted their future emotions based on emotional valence and probability of occurrence, and a hypothetical model was verified. Furthermore, focusing on participants' feelings of self-efficacy formed by past and their subjective view of the probability of events occurring as regulating parameters of future emotional states, it was found that they are connected to changes in emotional valence when predicting emotions.

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It is discussed how different Kansei Engineering and Emotional Engineering are. Kansei Engineering starts from the outer world, while Emotional Engineering starts from within or our motivation. Thus, their stands are opposite. Kansei Engineering, therefore, may be thought to be passive, while Emotional Engineering is active. And Kansei Engineering is built on a fixed model. But Emotional Engineering's model is very much adaptive. Kansei Engineering is based on an open loop system approach, while Emotional Engineering is based on a closed loop system approach.

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This paper points out that current industries drag the history of technical invention and industries, especially Japanese industries would like to go it alone. In the age of small changes and diversification, such an approach as Keiretsu, or development inside the group, was effective, But with the rapid increase of diversification and frequent and extensive changes in society call for more flexible and adaptive industry framework. Lego style industry framework will increase the capabilities of intermediary industries and will enable them to cater to many different requirements from the final product industry. Thus, industry can develop a very new and innovative products with much ease and with less time, energy and cost and what is betterm they can develop products from a true human needs.

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When an IT company introduces a new large scale system, many design documents are created. However, when a specification change of the system happens, the design documents which are related to the specification change can't be extracted efficiently and the engineers can't identify affected range because the extraction of these non-associated documents depends heavily on the experiences of the engineers. Therefore, in order to improve design quality and to introduce the system efficiently, it is of vital importance for the engineers to extract the susceptible affected design documents. In this paper, the method semi-automatically generating metadata to design document and linking design information using the ER diagrams and the CRUD matrixes which are generated in the initial design phase is proposed. Besides, the system of extracting the design documents which are associated to the specification change and specifying impact ranges of the specification changes is developed. In case study, the system is evaluated.

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In the present competitive situation, it seems insufficient for designers/engineers to just solve or meet obvious and known problems or needs by evolution of existing approaches. The purpose of this research is to propose a method and a computational tool to support designer/engineers' idea generation so that they can find or discern potential but essential problems and needs of people or society and devise creative and innovative design solutions to solve or meet them. As the first step of study on Design Idea Generation Support (DIGS) software tool which activity DIGS up ideas from designer/engineers' mind by stimulating their conscious/subconscious memory with word association suggestion, we made experiments of idea generation by students working on design project with associated words. Word association using software with computational concept dictionary turned out to be effective to obtain associated word which user cannot think of by heart.

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For the cooperative design activities by a design team, a designer needs design object information not only about geometrical data and these attributes but also the design rationale such as the reason of decision making to understand ideas of the design proposes by other designers. To cope with such situation, we focused on influential relations between parts of design object, and previously proposed description supporting method for influential relations between parts. In this report, description method for the measures to influential relation is proposed. Typical measures to influential relation is classified into five types. Then by adding description of measures to influential relation as a case data, our proposed sytem can indicate not only influential relations candidate but also measures which had be done to them.

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When a designer finds a problem during a development process, and effective way of ensuring the security and safety of the product is to identify all the possible causes of the problem by FTA and fix them. Although FTA is an effective method, it is not easy for a designer to construct a complete fault tree without any misunderstanding or oversight. Quantity dimension indexing is the method which verifies consistency of a fault tree automatically by comparison of quantity dimension. This paper describes two result. First, how to verify the correct quantity dimension. Before, there were cases when one phrase had the plural interpretation, a designer had to index the quantity dimension to the phrase manually. The task requires a designer the amount of time and labor. So, this paper describes methods of consistency verification by searching all over the fault tree. Second, new automatic indexing method. FTA often overlook the dynamic fault event. So, it has been proposed the classification about the qualitative fault value, but it is not clear how to indexing automatically. The paper also describes the method of automatic indexing the qualitative fault value.

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[in Japanese]

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Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) has been successfully used in many mechanical industries such as automotive industries. However, most mechanical designers, in fact, cannot utilize CAE applications by themselves because of the sophisticated operations and a huge amount of time for the analysis. Recently, the concept of a new CAE, First Order Analysis (FOA), has been proposed in order to overcome these problems. This paper presents the method to support the conceptual designs using simplified model corresponding to the concept of FOA. First, thin-walled square hallow section T-joint model consideration of corner R on joint-section is introduced. Next, a procedure for determining the stiffness of joint-section is proposed, and the derived expression is presented. Finally, some examples are provided to confirm the method proposed here.

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This paper discusses an application of inerters' mechanical elements to building passive suspension systems for improving body displacement as a ride comfort. Thanh-Tung Tran et al. have proposed new design of an independent suspension system using the inerter mechanism allows changing the sprung and un-sprung masses. They confirmed improving the vehicle stability with displacement on rough ground. In this paper, to accurately evaluate ride comfort, we introduced the passenger model for reproducing a shaking head as the effect of ride comfort and carried out the simulation of the vehicle suspension models with the passenger model. These analysis results were described and discussed into the paper.

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Minimizing brake squeal is a quite important issues in the development of high performance baking systems. This paper proposes a design optimization method for disc brake systems to reduce brake squeal considering robustness against changes on contact surface pressure distribution between the brake disc and pad, which can be used at the conceptual design stage. In this method, a simplified analysis model is developed considering surface pressure distribution and a design criterion to evaluate brake squeal performance is proposed, then, an optimization problem is formulated with maximization of the brake-pad contact area as the objective function, and the optimization problemis solved using a genetic algorithm. The proposed method is then applied to design problems to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed design method.

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Bayesian network is the is one of the probabilistic graphical models that represents a set of random variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph. In this study, Bayesian network is applied for the stock price forecast. The present method classifies stock price into three situations; normal value, positive and negative outliers. Different networks are defined by data in three situations in order to forecast the stock price. The effectiveness of the present method is discussed in the numerical example.

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Importance of personal authentication increases according to the progress of advanced information society and web service. This paper describes the personal authentication by using Kinect sensor. Feature quantities of the human face and the human voice are obtained through the Kinect sensor. Personal authentication is performed with the machine learning algorithms with the feature quantities. The neural network, support vector machine and Bayesian network are compared in the experimental results. The results show that the neural network is the most promising.

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Independence support robots using multi joint manipulators are thriving in the field of welfare. Keyboards or joysticks are generally used in the remote operation of the multi joint manipulator. The posture of the multi joint manipulators can be ordered by the angle of the joystick or preconfigured key assignment. The control systems have a problem, however, that the number of operable joints is limited to the number of joystick axes or keyboard buttons. In this study, we propose a remote control system for the multi joint manipulator using touch panel and gyroscope. We call the system TGC (Touch Gyro Control). Miniaturization and performance increase are in progress to various sensors such as gyroscope and touch panel with the development of MEMS technology in recent years. In addition, these sensors have spread rapidly in our living environment. In this study, we use touch panel and gyroscope mounted on a smartphone. TGC system can control rotational movement of the maniplator using the orientation of the smartphone, translational movement in the horizontal plane using the drag operation of the touch panel display and translational movement in the vertical plane using up and down motion of the arm which is gripping the smartphone. For the quantitative evaluation, we experimented with 3D pointing using TGC and compared to the conventional method of button-type. The result of the experiment indicated that TGC could point faster than conventional button-type method. In addition, we also experimented with the task that grip and transfer screws into a box using 6-DOF manipulator which is controlled by above two methods. The result of this experiment also showed the advantage of TGC. The usefulness of TGC for the operation of the multi joint manipulator can be expected.

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In this paper, we discuss about the amount of navigation information to provide to the driver using the head-up display car navigtion for motorcycle. From our previous research, we confirmed presenting symbolic information like arrows can navigate for a specific crossroad. It is clear that only providing one arrow of information is not enough to actually navigate the motorcycle driver. To provide enough geographical information, usages of letters are necessary. Although, we need to consider not to provide too much information, since we do not wish the driver taking too much time looking at the provided information rather than looking at the road or the traffic environment. To confirm the proper information amount, we conducted a motorcycle simulator experiment in the immersive CAVE environment using the head-up display. The subject was provided information in Japanese Hiragana while driving the motorcycle simulator in a virtual test course. We used an eye mark recorder to measure the subject's viewpoint to calculate the duration spent for the presented information. From the experiment, we conclude that the preferable amount of information to provide while driving is 4 letters of Hiragana.

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Plastic injection molding is one of the most important and major manufacturing methods for plastic products. The process parameters in plastic injection molding affect the quality and the manufacturing cost of plastic products, and it is important to find the optimal process parameters for high quality. But finding optimal process parameters is not easy because the plastic injection molding is nonlinear phenomena. Recently plastic injection molding simulation coupled with optimization technique has attracted attention. In this paper, optimization using a sequential approximate optimization with raidal basis function network is adopted to reduce the number of simulation runs. In particular, a multi-objective optimization is formulated. Therefore, both volume shrinkage and clamping force are minimized. In addition, inappropriate process parameters will easily lead to short shot that the melt plastic is not filled into the molding die. In this paper, the short shot is handled as the design constraint. The pareto-frontier is identified with a small number of simulation runs. It is noteworthy that the pareto-frontier is discontinuous. Through numerical simulation, the validity of the proposed approach is discussed.

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In deep drawing, area above the trimmed line is called earing. Reduction of the earing is one of the major issues for cost reduction. In addition, it is well known that blank holder force (BHF) has a direct influence on the product quality. A high BHF causes tearing, while a low BHF leads to wrinkling. Therefore it is important to determine an appropriate BHF through drawing. Recently, variable BHF (VBHF) approach which varies through the punch stroke has received a lot of attention, and its validity is discussed. In this study, both initial blank shape minimizing the earing and VBHF trajectory are simultaneously determined under tearing/wrinkling constants. In particular, two objective functions are defined for evaluation the earing. In other words, our design problem is formulated as a multi-objective design optimization. First objective function is the area above the trimmed line, and second one is the area below the trimmed line. In general, numerical simulation in sheet forming is so expensive that a sequential approximate optimization (SAO) using the radial basis function (RBF) network is adopted to identify the Pareto-frontier. The validity of the proposed approach is examined through numerical simulation. It can be found from the numerical result that earing is drastically reduced by the proposed approach.

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The "buffet" which is the shock wave vibration on the wing at transonic speed has influence to the aerodynamic performance of the civil transport. It is significant because the wing cannot maintain its aerodynamic performance and it is also led to the stall. Therefore, several researches on the suppression of the buffet are carried out. A Vortex Generator (VG) is one of the way which can improve to the transonic buffet. It is simple device and widely applied to the commercial airplane. Conventionally, VGs are installed along the wing span. However, they increase the friction and the instruction drag. Thus, the number of VGs should not by beyond the minimum necessary. Another problem is that it is still expensive for the computational fluid dynamics to simulate the small size vortex accurately. Therefore, the optimization procedure of the VGs installation is developed with directly combining the wind tunnel evaluation result. To reduce the number of experimentations, the surrogate model based GA exploration is employed. The design objective is to maintain the linearity of the variation lift with changing angle of attack (lift curve), because the stall is appeared if the curvature of the lift curves become smaller. Eight initial designs are evaluated and five design samples are acquired. As this result, optimum samples can be explored with reducing the number of the experiment. Several samples successfully prevent the stall without increasing the drag. In addition, the design knowledge can be obtained regarding the optimum VG's layout by visualization of the frequency distribution.

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Optical characteristics of design specifications required for organic light emitting diode are emitted light intensity, spectrum, color rendering and so on. By appropriately designing the optical properties and the structure of films, it may be possible to achieve various optical performance of OLED. Because it is necessary to consider simultaneously these optical characteristics, multi-objective optimization is essential for the design of OLED. The objective function has often trade-off relationship, so the Pareto optimum solutions should be visualized. Optimum design solutions obtained by using the satisficing trade-off method are shown in this paper.

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[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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A number of unmanned small-size helicopters are widely used for industrial applications in recent years. This study focuses on a sytem of a small-size helicopter with a suspended load. Since vibration of the load have a bad effect on the safety flight, it is necessary to suppress the vibration. Thus purpose of this study is to develop a vibration control method for the system. Additionally, we demonstrate a control system design method. We applied delayed feedback control to the system in order to suppress the vibration by measuring angles of the load without state estimators. A limitation of the control is that the controller is difficult to design because it is the nonlinear control method. We designed the optimum delayed feedback controller by defininf a simple model and describing root loci of the system by using Pade approximation. The effectiveness of the present method was verified by flight tests. The results indicate that the method can be applied regardless of its cable length.

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The purpose of this study is to generate the gait of a two-legged robot to avoid obstacles. It is expected that two-legged robot can avoid obstacle more smoothly in the same way that animal and human adjust stride naturally to step over obstacles. Stepping points are determined optimally under the condition of maximizing walking speed and/or minimizing energy for walking. The gait generation problem is reduced to a combinatorial optimization problem solved by using genetic algorithm. Orbits of toes and hip between stepping points are generated by means of parametric modeling. The stable walking patterns are obtained under the condition of the maximizing walking speed and the minimizing energy consumption. The pareto front of the multi-objective optimization for the given robot model is visualized in advance by the linear weighted sum method, the optimum walking pattern is determined by using the satisficing trade-off method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by simulation results.

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Based on the arguments discussed in the previous report, a prototype of hybrid emergent design system, which is a combination of L-system and cellular automata, is proposed. It is shown that automata can propagate stimulation on the structural body, which is generated by L-system. This gives a foundation for bi-directional interaction between theses two emergent systems. Also, some arguents on "interpretation", which connect abstract sequence of signs generated by L-system to corresponding design solution in real world, are shown. For the purpose, the triadic relation that is originally proposed by C. S. Peirce is introduced. The triadic relation is expanding to dynamic semiotic process, which is expressed by sequence of the triadic relation. Finally, meta-scheme for the hybrid emergent algorithm is proposed.

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This paper describes discussions about a framework of design methodology based on emergent design and optimum design. Concretely, a framework of design methodology is proposed by introducing a viewpoint considering the design process and a framework of design theory (Multispace design model) to emergent design and optimum design. Emergent design has a bottom up process and top down process as seen in Emergence. On the other hand, the optimum design has a top down process, which possesses reductionistic features. As a result, it is described how design methods can be grouped into two categories: an emergent-focus method and optimum-focus method. Moreover, two effects are discussed on the basis of the proposed framework.

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Service is considered as an import means to provide various values in the matured economy and industries. In the field of Service Engineering, various tools, methods, and methodologies have been proposed for the design and development of services based on engineering design technolgies. Recently, various research activities on service design have been conducted independently and it is required to clarify their relations from both the academic and practical viewpoints and moreover to clarify the role and effectiveness of engineering design approach to service design. In this paper, the author introduces the analysis results of recent service design studies in several research fields and clarifies the current issues to be tackled in service design. The author discusses how the engineering design approach should tackle these issues and what kinds of studies are required for it.

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To strengthen the service industry in Japan, improvement of service productivity by means of scientific approaches has been tried. As for the tourism industry, the governmental growth strategy and the upcoming Olympic Games enhance the importance of the industry. To promote Japan as a destination, it is essential to fulfill various needs of tourists coming from many different places. As a large variation of tours needs to be offered, improvement of productivity is strongly desired. One of the most challenging phases of the tour design is to determine a sequence of tourist attractions. This paper proposes a design support method for service sequence. Network structured models are employed to visualize relationships among tourist attractions in three aspects; place, time and content. Tour designs are evaluated by service simulation that incorporates multiple stakeholders; provider, supplier and customer. The proposed method was implemented as a prototype system. By using the prototype system, a case study was conducted. The case study demonstrated the usefulness of the proposed method.

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In manufacturing, systems combining physical products and services have been attracting much attention. In PSSs, it is important for designers to construct the business model that achieves value in use for receivers as well as reduces life cycle cost. However, difficults still remain with regard to planning the change in business models according to required value from receivers. Therefore, this study aims to propose a method for planning the change in business models in order to achieve value as well as reduce life cycle cost. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by an application to a power supply business.

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An important process for the reuse and recycling of end-of-life products is their disassembly. In general, manual disassembly is a labor intensive and costly process. Especially, removing fasteners takes time and cost. This paper proposes a design method for the disassembly of products with split-lines, which enable to destruct a poduct into desired shapes like pull tabs of cans and caps of PET bottles. This method supports a designer to add split-lines to the products in the design phase in order to extract a target component. Especially, this paper proposes a method for determining the location of split-lines by detecting interference regions between components. A case study shows that the dismantling of a LCD TV with split-lines reduces the number of manual operations needed for extracting a target component.

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