A Systematic Approach to Support Drive Train Design Using Tools for Human Comfort Evaluation and Customer Classification

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Albers ◽  
Sarawut Lerspalungsanti ◽  
Tobias Du¨ser ◽  
Sascha Ott ◽  
Jiangang Wang
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Ride Comfort ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Dynamic Properties ◽  
Drive Train ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Start Up ◽  
Customer Classification ◽  
Subjective Sensation

This article presents a systematic procedure and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) based tool for comfort objectification and customer classification, to support drive train developer during the product development process. In this case, the term “comfort objectification” can be clarified as reproduction of subjectively sensed convenience of a passenger through objectively measurable values. Many factors, such as noise, vibration, physical or psychological condition of a passenger generally influence the ride comfort. The main purpose of this project is to develop the drive train and his assemblies which can sustain customers’ demand of vibration comfort. The presented methods enable the identification and the evaluation of vehicle dynamic properties from the passengers’ point of view during start-up, shifting, steering as well as other procedures in the early stage of the product development process. For instance, this tool is developed for the evaluation of ride comfort during a start-up of a front-drive, intermediate-class car. To estimate the subjective sensation, the new driver modeling tool based on ANN is developed from the way individual drivers make their assessment. This paper presents a user-friendly interface which allows both experts and users who are still short of experience in the ANN field, to create different network structures depending on the task. By means of this tool, the modeling process can be effectively simplified and shortened. As a result, the objective values captured during each drive test are efficiently correlated with the subjective sensation. Consequently, the high performance of comfort prediction can be achieved. By using self organizing map as a tool for driver classification, the different types of drivers can be considered due to their comfort expectation and style of driving. The comfort prediction concerning each driver group can then be carried out. According to the approach of virtual drive train development, in this study, the elaborated multi-body simulation models are primarily used to generate several virtual start-up processes. This enables the determination of NVH properties of the future product and allows the developer to investigate the effect of vibration like judder and jerking on the degree of ride comfort. By applying objective data from the simulation, the comfort assessment using the presented tools can be executed. In the long run, costly drive tests and cost-intensive prototypes can be partially replaced.

On the Use of a Simplified New Product Development Process in an Early-Stage Firm

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tucker J. Marion ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
New Product ◽  
Consumer Product ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Established Firms ◽  
New Product Development Process

Disciplined product development has been a hallmark of mature companies for many decades, resulting in shorter development cycles, reduced costs, and higher quality products. Unfortunately, these tools and processes have typically been applied in large, well-established firms, not start-up companies. In this paper, we describe a simplified new product development process for early-stage firms and its application to a consumer product in which the process was executed during a 14-month development cycle. The process consists of 15-steps in 3-phases, two decision gates, and provides a step-by-step guide for development, with specific call-outs as to what, when, and where tools such as market segmentation, platform planning, industrial design, and cost modeling should be applied. The proposed process is applied to design a new consumer product, and the case study results are discussed with specific emphasis on costs, duration, and applicability of the process and its related engineering tools. Finally, we conclude with comments on the limitations of the proposed process, potential improvements, and future work.

CORPORATE CHAMPIONS OF EARLY-STAGE PROJECT PROPOSALS AND THE INSTITUTIONALISATION OF ORGANISATIONAL INERTIA

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (03) ◽  
pp. 2050028
Author(s):  
HEIDI M. J. BERTELS ◽  
MURAD MITHANI ◽  
SIWEI ZHU ◽  
PETER A. KOEN
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Mba Students ◽  
Executive Mba ◽  
Using Data ◽  
To Receive

This study looks at the role of champions in the early stages of the product development process, when employees try to secure initial funding for project proposals. Project proposals that fail to receive funding never become part of the firm’s project pipeline; hence, it is critical to understand the champion’s role early on. Existing research on corporate champions is mostly focused on the later stages of the new product development process and has generally identified corporate champions as key to projects likely to face organisational resistance. However, several recent studies suggest that champions may prefer projects less likely to face organisational resistance. Using data from project proposals of executive MBA students across 78 large organisations, we find that champion support for the team is weaker for project proposals likely to evoke resistance and that such lower champion support further reduces the likelihood of high-resistance early-stage proposals to receive initial funding.

Smartphone As a Stand-Alone Device for Rendering, Visualization and Tracking for Use During Product Development in Virtual Reality (VR)

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atif Mahboob ◽  
Stephan Husung ◽  
Christian Weber ◽  
Andreas Liebal ◽  
Heidi Krömker
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Product Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Product Evaluation ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Installation Space ◽  
Position Tracking ◽  
Head Mounted Display ◽  
Behavior Simulation

Abstract Product development process makes use of different models, methods and available technologies to validate product requirements at an early stage. Technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are increasingly finding their application in industry and in the product development process. VR has the potential to support the product evaluation process. However, the costly preparation of VR scenes and the expensive hardware needed for the implementation greatly limits its use in the industry. Normally, the different VR content development and rendering softwares are application specific and offer very limited interoperability or reuse of created content. In addition, the needed hardware usually consists of dedicated visualization computers, tracking sensors, interaction devices and requires a fixed installation space. The motivation for the work presented in this paper is to reduce the preparation effort, hardware cost and remove the need for a fixed installation usually required by VR. The High-End smartphones of today from almost all the manufacturers can facilitate the development and stand-alone execution of VR and AR applications. However, the major application of Smartphone Virtual Reality (SVR) is mainly in the entertainment industry i.e. VR-gaming or visualization applications etc. VR until today is thought to be a visualization technology that requires special hardware for its implementation. There are hardly any applications of SVR in the industry today mainly because of two reasons. First, the position tracking against the user movement in the virtual scene is not readily available in SVR. It is usually achieved by attaching additional tracking devices to smartphones. Secondly, the smartphones themselves are not perceived as high-performance devices suitable for industrial simulations. This paper discusses a method for efficient preparation of VR-scene along with their behavior simulations and presents a novel SVR application that eliminates the need for expensive VR hardware. The challenges and the requirements from the SVR along with the possible solutions are discussed in detail. The presented SVR application includes product behavior simulation and wireless communication with a laptop. An example product along with its behavior simulation sums-up the application of SVR in the product development process. The position tracking in SVR is implemented and an experiment compares the precision of this position tracking with the tracking achieved by a Head Mounted Display (HMD). The experimental setup along with the achieved results are also discussed. A user survey conducted for the smartphone VR application and the feedback of this survey is also presented in this paper.

Technical Note—Waterfall and Agile Product Development Approaches: Disjunctive Stochastic Programming Formulations

2020 ◽  
Vol 68 (5) ◽  
pp. 1356-1363
Author(s):  
Janne Kettunen ◽  
Miguel A. Lejeune
Keyword(s):  
Stochastic Programming ◽  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Return Level ◽  
Chance Constrained Programming ◽  
High Confidence ◽  
Start Up

When engaging in the development of new products, the primary objective of start-up companies is to generate a specified return level quickly and with high confidence. Achieving this goal is complicated because of uncertainties in projects’ returns and durations. In the study titled, “Waterfall and Agile Product Development Approaches: Disjunctive Stochastic Programming Formulations,” Kettunen and Lejeune develop new disjunctive chance-constrained programming models that capture this goal. The first static model reflects the traditional waterfall product development process, whereas the second one is dynamic and depicts the agile product development process. Kettunen and Lejeune design a novel reformulation method and a decomposition algorithm and use them on a new product development problem encountered by a U.S.-based software start-up company. The results reveal that high confidence in reaching a certain return can be achieved by investing in projects with a longer development time and higher risk. Additionally, overlooking the capability to make dynamic decisions, as allowed by the agile approach, leads to overestimating the time needed to obtain the targeted return.

Design Parameter Investigation in Customer-Oriented Drive Train Development Using Human Sensation Modeling Tools

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Albers ◽  
Sarawut Lerspalungsanti ◽  
Tobias Du¨ser ◽  
Sascha Ott
Keyword(s):  
Development Process ◽  
Friction Pair ◽  
Drive Train ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Simulation Methods ◽  
Modeling Tools ◽  
Driving Situation ◽  
Comfort Evaluation ◽  
Start Up

The integration of customer demands in the early phase of product development process is one of most important aspects in the field of automotive engineering. In addition to a customer survey which generally requires drive tests of the real prototypes, methods based on the virtual product design have been applied more and more frequently. Due to the potential of simulation methods, the development time can be shortened and the costly prototypes as well as the time-consuming drive tests can be partially excluded. Earlier studies have demonstrated a capability of the developed methods and tools to support the customer-oriented drive train design by means of the prediction of the subjective comfort evaluation. In this case, the potential customers are classified into three groups based on their comfort expectation and style of driving. The rating from the customer point of view is accordingly achieved by modeling of the human sensation from the way the individual passengers make their evaluation by means of the Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The objective of the current research is to implement the developed methods in the design phase of the drive train development process to enhance the customer comfortability. This article presents a systematic approach to apply the simulation methods in order to investigate different design parameters of the drive train and to determine the consequent customer comfort evaluation during each driving situation, the vehicle start-up as an example. For this purpose, the modification of the elaborated vehicle model is carried out by variation of the comfort-relevant design parameters, such as the friction coefficient gradient of the clutch friction pair, the mass of inertia and the damping of the components, like the dual mass flywheel. Depending on each drive train configuration and driver demand on the vehicle start-up, the simulated driving situation with different effects on the occurrence of the rotary vibration is evaluated by means of the human sensation model. This is developed during the drive tests on the basis of driver rating behavior. Based on the predicted comfort evaluations from different types of customer, the decisions made by the developer such as the determination of the clutch disk property or the damping setting of component can be efficiently supported during the drive train design. Hence, a new drive train concept can be tested and improved in such a way that the satisfaction of a target customer group from the first prototypes is obtained.

scholarly journals Reducing Time for the Product Development Process by Evaluation in the Phase of Solution Searching

10.14311/476 ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
B. Jokele ◽  
D. K. Fuchs
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Systematic Approach ◽  
Time Pressure ◽  
Preventive Measures ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Industrial Practice ◽  
Successful Solution ◽  
Product And Process

Less and less time is available for product development process. To prevent product failures and the resulting time intensive and cost intensive iteration steps, some preventive measures must be taken. Within the scope of quality management, FMEA anticipates possible problems concerning product and process properties. Nevertheless, in industrial practice designed products can have failures which were not considered within FMEA. The time pressure is immense, and efforts which do not make a contribution to a successful solution are regarded as lost time.This paper introduces a systematic approach to troubleshooting, with the aim of reducing the time for solution searching by considering the feasibility of ideas at an early stage.

Experience Design Applied to Research

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea CAPRA ◽  
Ana BERGER ◽  
Daniela SZABLUK ◽  
Manuela OLIVEIRA
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Product Development ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Experience Design ◽  
Low Resolution ◽  
Design Concepts ◽  
Innovative Products ◽  
Technological Products

An accurate understanding of users' needs is essential for the development of innovative products. This article presents an exploratory method of user centered research in the context of the design process of technological products, conceived from the demands of a large information technology company. The method is oriented - but not restricted - to the initial stages of the product development process, and uses low-resolution prototypes and simulations of interactions, allowing users to imagine themselves in a future context through fictitious environments and scenarios in the ambit of ideation. The method is effective in identifying the requirements of the experience related to the product’s usage and allows rapid iteration on existing assumptions and greater exploration of design concepts that emerge throughout the investigation.

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