Biologicalisation calls for the integration of biological knowledge in manufacturing. Although biologists have been cataloguing biological knowledge for centuries, for the non-biologist finding this inspiration as input for bio-inspired design is a major challenge. In this paper, three different methods are used to find bio-inspiration for a case study on the clamping interface of a flexible mobile machining unit: the AskNature database, a natural language processing (NLP) approach, drawing on a large corpus of biological publications, and an informal consultation of an expert biologist as could be organised by a design office. The comparison of the retrieved principles with AskNature as a baseline indicates that the NLP approach allows retrieving publications about relevant biological strategies with a good recall performance, without involving an expert. However, extracting the working principles from the biological articles retrieved with the NLP approach is found to be error-prone and time consuming.

The paper explores and presents results of an investigation handling design methodologies using the bio-space and biological phenomena combined with the technical space for the development, design and application of products, machine tools, processes and manufacturing systems carried out by a multinational team including Fraunhofer and CIRP fellows. The main biological approach for designing was bio-inspiration. However, links and examples implementing bio-integration and bio-intelligence were also considered and analyzed during the investigation.The paper describes a systematic design procedure starting from requirements and applications related to manufacturing, using well-known theories and experience in engineering, however analyzing and applying biological materials, properties, structures, phenomena and complete systems. Sustainability aspects combined with the immense and ever growing capacity of ICT and digitization possibilities provided new options for design methodologies.A moveable and flexible machine tool was virtually used as a demonstrator to describe the new methodology. It was proved that the o ngoing process of learning from nature and applying biological phenomena, structures and materials, together with new technologies such as Additive Manufacturing (AM) can develop new ideas, processes, manufacturing systems, and products with benefits to performance, productivity, efficiency and sustainability. Nature and biological domains can be integrated, can inspire, be implemented or even applied as an intelligent system in the design procedure.

Using bio-inspiration allows engineers to use the knowledge implicitly built up by natural evolution. Current tools for providing engineers with bio-inspiration yield many biological working principles. Starting from the Linnaean taxonomy, which can be seen as a design revision history, this work proposes metrics for a working principle based on the observations of that working principle in different organisms. A first metric measures the reinforcement of a working principle via the number of observations (publications/submissions to a database) made by biologists. Furthermore, biological strategies that evolve independently and use the same working principle might be more resilient and globally applicable, prompting the proposal of a metric measuring the spread in the taxonomy. Finally, bio-novelty measures the biological novelty, inversely related to the biological diversity employing the working principle. To illustrate the use of the metrics, they are applied to the working principles identified in the ‘temporary attachment’ category of AskNature.

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