Margins in design – review of related concepts and methods

Brahma, Arindam; Ferguson, Scott; Eckert, Claudia; Isaksson, Ola

doi:10.1080/09544828.2023.2225842

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…Change multipliers are seen as intervention points by the development team to enhance the changeability of the system (Giffin et al 2009; Masood, Kern & John Clarkson 2021). Allocating margins is an overarching concept that deals with such interventions (Brahma et al 2023). Margins can be defined as the absolute difference between the requirements or the constraints on a parameter value and its actual capability (Eckert et al 2019).…”

Section: Findings: Incorporating Changeability For Value Robustnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Margins can be defined as the absolute difference between the requirements or the constraints on a parameter value and its actual capability (Eckert et al 2019). They are included in systems to achieve different purposes, such as enhancing safety and reliability, ensuring future rework, mitigating the impact of changing specifications, and so forth (Brahma et al 2023). Margins can be subdivided into buffer and excess, where the buffer addresses uncertainties and the excess represents the surplus (Eckert et al 2019).…”

Section: Findings: Incorporating Changeability For Value Robustnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Incorporating changeability for value-robust product-service systems: an integrative review

Machchhar,

Bertoni,

Wall

et al. 2024

Des. Sci.

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The ongoing servitization journey of the manufacturing industries instills a through-life perspective of value, where a combination of products and services is delivered to meet expectations. Often described as a product-service system (PSS), these systems are poised with many complexity aspects, introducing uncertainties during the design phase. Incorporating changeability is one of the known strategies to deal with such uncertainties, where the system changes in the face of uncertainty to sustain value, thereby achieving value robustness. While the theme of dealing with multiple uncertainties has been discussed since the inception of PSS, changeability is still poorly addressed. To bridge this gap, an integrative literature review is performed to outline various complexities aspects and their link to uncertainty from a PSS perspective. Also, the state-of-the-art approach to achieving value robustness is presented via changeability incorporation. Subsequently, a reference framework is proposed to guide decision-makers in changeability incorporation in PSS, especially during the early design stages.

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Section: Findings: Incorporating Changeability For Value Robustnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Findings: Incorporating Changeability For Value Robustnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incorporating changeability for value-robust product-service systems: an integrative review

Machchhar,

Bertoni,

Wall

et al. 2024

Des. Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In addition to the discussion in the previous section, we derive from Brahma et al (2023)'s list of margins which appear at different stages of a product development cycle and map them to the commonly used DfCE strategies as shown in Figure 2. For example, if the designer intends to design for durability, margins may be added such that the wear and tear over the life of the product.…”

Section: The Delicate Balance Between Dfce and Excess Marginsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As in Equation ( 1), the total embodied energy of all the margins added to a product to make it circular (Emargin) and the total energy consumed in processes between lifecycles (Etl; such as in remanufacturing, repair, recycling etc), must be lesser than the total embodied energy of the equivalent non-circular product (Eeol; including all the embodied energy wasted at end of life), for it to be a more sustainable product. Several approaches which can potentially be used to accurately quantify the margins in a design can be found in literature (Brahma et al, 2023). The accurate quantification of margins and tracking them throughout the lifecycle of a product is necessary to confidently estimate whether there is a "net benefit" in adding margins to a design to make them circular.…”

Section: The Delicate Balance Between Dfce and Excess Marginsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Margins, which are defined as the difference between a design parameter's minimum required value to ensure functionality and its actual capability (Eckert et al, 2019), are often incorporated into products, either deliberately or inadvertently by design engineers (Brahma and Wynn, 2020;Eckert et al, 2004). The practice primarily comes from various strategies employed for uncertainty mitigation, which is often based on intuition and experience (Brahma et al, 2023). There is also a tendency to 'err on the side of caution', which at times leads to highly and unnecessarily overdesigned products (excessive margins) (Jones and Eckert, 2023).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Circular products: the balance between sustainability and excessive margins in design

Brahma,

Hallstedt,

Wynn

et al. 2024

Proc. Des. Soc.

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As the world deals with climate change, it is crucial that new products are designed to be more sustainable. Product design strategies which conform to the Circular Economy principles have recently gained attention, which promote sustainability and resource efficiency. However, such strategies require careful consideration of uncertainties and the ways to mitigate them, e.g. by using margins. The pursuit of circularity can inadvertently lead to overdesign as designers strive to mitigate elevated risks, thereby making a product less sustainable. In this paper, we explore this balance.

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Mechanisms to support changeability during sustainment: Modularity, excess, and operations

Singh,

Szajnfarber

2024

Systems Engineering

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Complex engineered systems face protracted design cycles and indefinite lifetimes, leading to discrepancies between expected and actual operating conditions. The field of design for changeability has focused on developing strategies to cope with these discrepancies. Literature has implicitly assumed that future changes can be predicted by system designers, but this assumption does not match observed reality. Often, systems must be modified in unexpected ways to maintain value, limiting the usefulness of standard change mechanisms. To understand how unexpected changes are implemented in practice, we studied the C‐130, a setting where one platform performed many missions, and close air support in Desert Storm, a setting where many platforms performed one mission. Through this examination, we find that excess and operator change are key mechanisms for changeability that have been largely ignored by literature. Excess can enable additions to systems without having to remove or swap subsystems out. It is also a critical enabler of modular changes during the operational phase. Operator changes are non‐form changes driven by system users who change how their systems are used to gain new capabilities rather than relying on changes to the form of the system. This paper also studies the relationship between these mechanisms to shed light on how changeability is achieved in practice, building the foundation for future work to study tradeoffs of implementing valuable excess during design.

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Margins in design – review of related concepts and methods

Cited by 10 publications

References 111 publications

Incorporating changeability for value-robust product-service systems: an integrative review

Incorporating changeability for value-robust product-service systems: an integrative review

Circular products: the balance between sustainability and excessive margins in design

Mechanisms to support changeability during sustainment: Modularity, excess, and operations

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