Lean Product Development Process with Design Verification Stages in the Value Stream of Automotive Industry

In the automotive industry, lean projects and innovation creation come to life by being updated under the control of systematic interdisciplinary process flows. The lean product development process that changes the shell, defined under the light of the variables created by the competitive conditions, is today measured by the value flow efficiency and the global market spread of the final product. Consequently, the lean product development approach, which aims to identify and purify all the wastes that do none value or create value to the system or cause burdens in the new product development process, is shaped by step-by-step approvals in the flow. In the main automotive industry company practices within the scope of the research (3 national, 3 international), the beginning of the concept of lean in design is to define and optimize the steps in the product development process under the value stream map. Therefore, the product function for which the customer has paid for, the function of the new product or the physical structure used to meet the needs in question, the comfort, life, experience, innovations of the scope that constitute the new product concept are planned and verified and implemented in the simplified automotive design stages at the beginning of the lean product development process. In this research, initial automotive design objectives and stages are at the focal point of the innovation and added value creation brought by the concept of “lean” approach. The research is modelled on the determination of steps that do not create added value together with the points where the flow circuits’ or stems, the process is devalued, the interdisciplinary holistic studies intensify, the information and delay begin and end in the sequential and simultaneous design validation step transition stages, which are examined under the lean approach. As a visual and virtual tool that enables the elaboration of nominal values such as the total duration of the design verification stages and the influence of interdisciplinary stakeholders or the test level of the product design with the new product added, it reveals the value flow or losses. Hence research;from innovation creation and new product design steps, which constitute the initial stages of the lean product development process, to design verification analysis, the efficiency of the automotive company processes within the scope of the research has been measured by comparing using lean automotive design techniques, methods and concepts.

Sensitivity Analysis for Safety Design Verification of General Aviation Reciprocating Aircraft Engine

This paper presents an application of global sensitivity analysis for system safety analysis of reciprocating aircraft engine. Compared with local sensitivity analysis results, global sensitivity analysis could provide more information on parameter inter- actions, which are significant in complex system safety analysis. First, a deterministic aviation reciprocating engine thermody- namics model is developed and parameters of interest are defined as random variables. Then, samples are generated by Monte Carlo method for the parameters used in engine model on the basis of definition of factor distribution. Eventually, results from engine model are generated and importance indices are calculated. Based on the analysis results, design is improved to satisfy the airworthiness requirements. The results reveal that by using global sensitivity analysis, the parameters could be ranked with respect to their importance, including first order indices and total sensitivity indices. By reducing the uncertainty of parameters and adjusting the range of inputs, safety criteria would be satisfied.

Key Human Factors of Vehicle Interior Occupant Packaging in SAE Standard

Fourteen SAE standards related to accommodation and occupant＇ packaging for vehicle interior are studied. The influencing factors, key reference accommodation points and major design dimensions and their relationships of occupant packaging and ergonomics during the vehicle interior layout design and development are analyzed. Prototypes are presented to verify the results and how to achieve the packaging is shown. Auto- mobile designers can achieve significant practical guidance for human safety, efficiency accommodation and occupant packaging of all passengers during the vehicle design process.

Valuable Impulses and Successful Models of Gearbox Development from Practice

Gears play an important role in mechanical engineering because of their moment and speed transmission possibilities. Design and optimization of a complete gearbox provide many requirements to the designer. The complex gearbox model consists of many machine elements （shafts, gears, bearings, housing, seals, and shaft-hub connections）. The gearbox must be understood as a system with interactive parts. Next to the calculation of kinematics, load capacities and life times of single elements, aspects of load distribution and efficiency and noise excitation of gearboxes become important. The wide range of knowhow needed mostly cannot be covered by a small number of engineers. The development of automated calculation routines with understandable and comprehensive results is the goal for these research projects that lead to sottware-realizing solutions for engineers to efficiently design, calculate, optimize and verify gearboxes with minimal resources in terms of calculation experts and time.

SRAM-Based FPGA Systems for Safety-Critical Applications： A Survey on Design Standards and Proposed Methodologies

As the ASIC design cost becomes affordable only for very large-scale productions, the FPGA technology is currently becoming the leading technology for those applications that require a small-scale production. FPGAs can be considered as a technology crossing between hardware and software. Only a small-number of standards for the design of safety-critical systems give guidelines and recommendations that take the peculiarities of the FPGA technology into consideration. The main contribution of this paper is an overview of the existing design standards that regulate the design and verification of FPCA-based systems in safety-critical application fields. Moreover, the paper proposes a survey of significant published research proposals and existing industrial guidelines about the topic, and collects and reports about some lessons learned from industrial and research projects involving the use of FPGA devices.

An Efficient Evaluation and Vector Generation Method for Observability-Enhanced Statement Coverage

Coverage evaluation is indispensable for verification via simulation. As the functional complexity of modern design is increasing at a breathtaking pace, it is requisite to take observability into account. Unfortunately, nowadays coverage metrics taking observability into account are not very satisfactory. On the one hand, for the observability assessment algorithms proposed up to now, the overhead of computing is large, so they could not be integrated into simulation tools easily. On the other hand, the vector generation methods involving the metrics taking observability into account are not very efficient, and there exists a disconnection between these metrics and the vector generation process. In this paper, some original ideas for the problems above are presented. （1） Precise and concise abstract representations from HDL （Hardware Description Language） descriptions at RTL （Register Transfer Level） are presented to model observability information. （2） A novel observability evaluation method based on the proposed models is introduced. This method is more computationally efficient than prior efforts to assess observability and it could be integrated into compilers and simulators easily. （3） A new simulation vector generation procedure involving the observability-enhanced statement coverage metric is developed. The method is simulation：based and driven by the distribution of unobserved statements. During this procedure, the proposed algorithm always tries to cover all unobserved statements, and reduce unnecessary backtracking, so it is efficient. The methods proposed have been implemented as a prototype tool for VHDL designs, and the results on benchmarks show significant benefits.