Yasushi Umeda

Abstract The relative significance of conceptual design to basic design or detail design is widely recognized, due to its influential roles in determining the product's fundamental features and development costs. Although there are some general methodologies dealing with functions in design, virtually no commercial CAD systems can support functional design, in particular so-called synthetic phase of design. Supporting the synthetic phase of conceptual design is one of the crucial issues of CAD s

A product design process begins with functional or conceptual design, followed by basic design and detailed design. Among these, functional design plays the central role in ensuring design quality and product innovativeness. Because function is the most crucial concept in designing better and more innovative products, functional reasoning technology is indispensable to the development of future advanced CAD technology. This survey shows how functional reasoning has successfully established the r

Environmental issues require a new manufacturing paradigm because the current mass production and mass consumption paradigm inevitably cause them. We have already proposed a new manufacturing paradigm called the “Post Mass Production Paradigm (PMPP)” that advocates sustainable production by decoupling economic growth from material and energy consumption. To realize PMPP, appropriate planning of a product life cycle (design of life cycle) is indispensable in addition to the traditional environmen

Extending product life is one of the hopeful approaches to reduce the environmental issue, which is one of the most critical issues of today. However, many products are thrown away because of obsolescence of functions and their performance. Therefore, we should design products to be functionally upgradable. Moreover, such upgradable products may create business chances at later stages of product life cycles. The objective of this research is to propose a design methodology for upgradability. Thi

In the Industry 4.0 era, cyber physical manufacturing systems (CPPS) has started to change activities of manufacturing system engineers into CPS based ones. In typical Japanese factories, manufacturing system engineers are always stationed at the shop floor and continuously improve manufacturing systems with workers. For supporting such engineers' activities, we are developing the concept of 'Digital Triplet' as an extension of Digital Twin. Digital Triplet consists of intelligent activity world

This paper proposes a design methodology for self-maintenance machines. The self-maintenance machine is a machine that can maintain its functions for a while, even though faults happen. In order to achieve capabilities for diagnosing and repair planning, a model based approach that employs qualitative physics is proposed. Regarding repair execution, two types of repair strategies are proposed; viz., control type and functional redundancy type which is a strategy to add redundancy to a machine fr

A machine can be made self-maintaining by taking advantage of functionally similar components when faults occur. The performance of the machine might degrade, but the required functions will continue. A self-maintenance machine should: constantly monitor its state; judge normal or faulty status using monitor data; diagnose even unknown faults by itself; generate a repair plan (based on the diagnostic results) that would enable the machine to perform at least some of the required functions; and e

For supporting kaizen (continuous improvement) activities typically observed in Japanese manufacturing companies, we are developing the concept of ‘Digital Triple’ as an extension of Digital Twin. Digital Triplet contains intelligent activity world in addition to the cyber world and the physical world and emphasizes the ability of knowledge-based support for manufacturing system engineers. At the same time, we are developing an education program based on Digital Triplet. This program contains an

While the European Union’s (EU) Circular Economy policy package includes various aspects, such as waste treatment, plastics recycling, reduction of food waste, and remanufacturing, it is essentially an industrial and employment promotion policy. In regard to the promotion of circular businesses, including remanufacturing, product-service system (PSS), and digital platforms, this policy may change the shape of the EU market and the core of market competition. However, many Japanese manufacturers