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An Equipment Design Approach to Achieve Production System Requirements

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Proceedings of the 33rd CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturing Systems

June 5-7, 2000
An Equipment Design Approach to Achieve Production System Requirements

J.F. Arinez, D.S. Cochran

Production System Design Laboratory
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
Tel: 617-253-1811, Fax: 617-258-7488, e-mail: arinez@mit.edu, dcochran@mit.edu

Abstract
Recently, interest has grown in improving production system design from a perspective typically associated
with systems engineering methods. This interest has been the result of the operational success in industry of
lean manufacturing methods that pursue improvement of the production system rather than the local
optimization of individual operations. However, despite the success of these shopfloor-based approaches,
the design of production systems can be further improved by use of scientific methods that provide structure
for attainment and verification of system requirements. To provide such structure, a production system design
decomposition has been developed using Axiomatic Design Theory that establishes the relationships
between high level system objectives and lower level design decisions. These relationships are expressed
within the decomposition via design matrices that permit communication of requirements as well as
establishing traceability between successive levels of the design decomposition. Communication and
traceability of requirements is particularly important in the design of equipment and their subsystems. For
manufacturing firms purchasing equipment, the generation and subsequent communication of system
requirements to vendors during concept selection determines how well final designs meet requirements.
Generally there is no rigorous and quantitative way for also expressing production system requirements to
equipment builders in a manner that may be easily translated into equipment parameters. This paper
presents an equipment design approach that quantitatively links production system requirements to the initial
design phase of equipment. The approach is comprised of four steps: identification of the set of production
system requirements that affect equipment design, transformation and communication of requirements to the
various types of equipment designers, analysis of system requirements, and decomposition of system
requirements into equipment parameters. Details of each step are explained and an industrial application
case example is presented that applies the equipment design approach.

Keywords: manufacturing system design, equipment requirements, axiomatic design

1 INTRODUCTION
Good design of a company’s production system has
always been an important contributor to overall
competitiveness in the marketplace by providing high
quality products while effectively maintaining low
production costs. However, production systems are
continually facing new and rapidly changing
requirements as customer expectations of product
performance, quality, cost, and delivery increase. For
these reasons, the ability to design a production system
in a way that carefully and systematically considers all
requirements is critical to ensuring a high level of
customer satisfaction.
Traditionally, production systems have evolved as
the requirements that they needed to meet evolved [1].
In stable, and slowly varying industries, designers of
production systems have the luxury to experiment and
try different approaches until they find one that works.
However, iterative design methods are not very
successful at keeping pace in highly dynamic industries
where product lifecycles are measured in months and
production resources quickly become obsolete.
Furthermore, production system designs are complex
organizations made up of many subsystems that interact
with each other and with outside companies, thus there
is a further need to design the system so that these
interactions are well characterized and understood.
Design of one subsystem without awareness of its effects
on other areas of the production system leads to sub-optimal
performance of the system as a whole. One area of production
system design that requires such an awareness is that of
equipment design. Equipment design has been traditionally an
operationally focused activity that has lacked the design
process tools to incorporate system requirements [2]. This
paper presents an equipment design approach that is linked to
a production system design that can be used to communicate
knowledge and understanding of system requirements and
interactions.
2A PRODUCTION SYSTEM DESIGN
DECOMPOSITION
A Production System Design Decomposition (PSDD) (shown in
Figure 1) has been developed to provide a tool to guide the
concept design phase from the initial statement of high level

Proceedings of the 33rd CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturing Systems, June 5-8, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden. 1
business objectives to their later translation into lower level,
more detailed design requirements [3]. These business
objectives are important because they affect any investment
made into manufacturing resources and their design. A
production system must also meet a wide diversity of
requirements that rapidly change and are often highly
uncertain in the concept design phase. Thus, three main
reasons motivating the PSDD may be summarized as follows:
(i) To provide a structured approach to design of
production systems.
(ii) To provide understanding of the many
interdependencies that arise between the
elements of production systems.
(iii) To provide a means to relate high level
requirements of the production system to the
design parameters/attributes of its constituent
elements.
Figure 1. Production System Design Decomposition
with view of high level system objectives.
First, a structured approach is one in which high
level goals are allocated and decomposed to the
constituent elements of the design in an organized
manner according to set procedures. In this case, the
approach is a top-down one and follows the design
process specified by Axiomatic Design theory [4]. A
structured design approach supports generation of a
clear representation of the production system
requirements. The top-down approach used here breaks
down (decomposes) high-level general statements of
requirements into more specific requirements that are
more easily understood by designers.
Second, production systems consist of many
subsystems that interact with one another. In some
cases, people must operate and manage these
subsystems even though there may be many external
interactions with companies beyond a firm’s own
immediate production system. Nevertheless, during
design of each of the subsystems, there must exist
knowledge of how any given subsystem affects and is
affected by other subsystems. To understand how the
system as a whole will function, knowledge of these
subsystem interdependencies is required. The
decomposition specifies the dependent relations
between subsystems via design matrices. Detailed
design and engineering involves precisely determining
these relations either analytically or empirically.
Third, for any production system design to
successfully meet its business objectives, they must be
related to each successively lower level so that
designers at any given level of detail may see how their
decisions influence attainment of these goals. The
decomposition must be understood by anyone in the
production organization from the vice-president of
operations down to the production engineer and
supervisor. This decomposition knowledge is provided to
designers in the form of inheritance relations from
parent-child associations. In this way, traceability of
requirements is achieved through the properties of
directed tree structures.
Proceedings of the 33rd CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturing Systems, June 5-8, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden. 2
2 OVERVIEW OF EQUIPMENT DESIGN
2.1 The Equipment Design Environment Before the link
between the PSDD and an equipment design approach is
presented, the field of equipment design is reviewed to
illustrate both the type and scope of design problems in which
such an approach may be used. Equipment design in this work
is treated in the most general sense with no specification of
industry nor type or function of equipment.
The equipment design environment may be characterized
by the types of challenges faced by designers. First, the
dynamic nature of product development with new products
continually being introduced and existing products being
modified, creates a great deal of uncertainty in expected future
requirements and performance of equipment. In addition,
equipment designs have to be robust to operate in production
systems that can often have a great deal of variability in
operational conditions. Varying operator and technician skill
levels lead to requirements that are difficult to design for
because of the inherent variability in humans.
Equipment is designed in increasingly more distributed
and decentralized organizational structures, and therefore
traditional command and control project management
approaches are no longer as effective. For example, many
companies outsource the design of equipment and therefore
the management of the equipment design process relies on
how well people within the company itself understand its
equipment needs [5]. Equipment design companies in turn
outsource the design of subsystems and components to other
vendors. The result is an equipment design supply chain that
must be viewed from the same system perspective as that of
the production system itself. The equipment design process
extends beyond the boundaries of any single company in this
chain and information sharing approaches become critical to
ensuring all requirements are met.
The manufacture of equipment itself is generally at low
volume compared to that of the products which it is used to
make. Moreover, equipment designs are subject to frequent
customization by the customer making the use of standardized
design methods difficult. Furthermore, with low production
volumes, gaining operational knowledge about equipment
designs requires much effort to gather data from the customer.
Gathering this data to improve future generations of designs is
complicated by the diversity of production systems and the
operating conditions into which equipment is placed. Designers
are often faced with the difficult task of developing standard
equipment to meet such a wide breadth of operating
requirements. Equipment designs must also have the flexibility
to be modified and improved to fit into the production system,
since not every possibility can be modeled or simulated ahead
of time.
2.2 Objectives of an Equipment Design Process Given the
above environment that equipment designers are faced with, a
general set of desirable objectives for a design process is as
follows:
1. Improved coordination of inter-related design tasks
for members of the design team by knowledge of task
dependencies.
2. Capture design reasoning for ongoing and repeated
decisions as well as the tradeoffs made between
alternative solutions.
3. Offer reusability of design information for future
design projects both in terms of specific hardware
designed as well as the design method employed.
4. Recognize where existing knowledge or tools can be
integrated at critical steps in the design process.
 5. Offer ease of management and make tracking of test whether a system FR/DP pair affects the ED
tasks possible to ensure that high level objectives are decomposition.
being met.
6. Design process should be integrated with generation
of the manufacturing process plan.
7. Provide support for queries that designers will make
of system objectives and the relation to parallel design
tasks.
8. Provide the flexibility to handle information in its
various representations (i.e. natural language
documents) and map it into the respective design
formats (i.e. decompositions).
The equipment design approach discussed next
provides an initial design process to support the above
objectives.

3 AN EQUIPMENT DESIGN APPROACH

3.1 Application Context
The approach may be thought of as a process by which
an equipment design decomposition(s) may be
developed from a production system and product design
decomposition hierarchies that have been derived using
Axiomatic Design. The main purpose of the approach is
therefore to address how the PSDD may be used to
carry out and support subsystem design in the context
of Axiomatic Design theory.
The approach consists of the four major steps
shown in Figure 2. The first step deals with identifying
the set of system requirements that influence equipment Figure 2. The Equipment Design Approach.
design. Secondly, this set must be transformed into
views that permits requirements to be understood by the Tagging of FR/DP pairs during decomposition of either the
various parties involved in the design of equipment. The production system or product design is performed by
third step is to analyze the requirements according to immediately asking the question: “Does the FR/DP pair affect
whether they may be verified during detailed design. the design of equipment?”. The accuracy of this method
The fourth step of the approach is the generation of the depends on the level of experience that the system designer
equipment design decomposition itself by establishing has in designing equipment. An alternative method is to use a
the FR-DP links between decompositions. general equipment decomposition that can be used to check
for interactions between system FR/DP pairs and equipment
3.2 Step 1 - Identification of Requirements DP pairs. This method is more systematic and objective and
The first step is the identification of equipment pertinent ensures the general decomposition is updated from one design
FR/DP pairs from the respective PSD and PD generation to the next (thus providing reusability in the design
decomposition hierarchies. In a design decomposition of process). Existing equipment designs combined with
a production system or a product, there are many pairs operational performance data can also be used to generate the
that can potentially influence the design of any given interaction matrix. The use of a weighted interaction matrix is
piece of equipment. Moreover, these FRs/DPs will arise shown in Figure 3 along with the weighting scale for influence.
at different stages and levels of detail in the equipment The resultant set of equipment FRs in the PSDD may be then
design process. Therefore, it is important to examine all highlighted in the functional hierarchy as indicated in Figure 4.
systems requirements and identify those which are
relevant to equipment since overlooked requirements
jeopardize the successful operation of the production
system.
In conventional equipment procurement, design
engineers must read through entire sets of requirements
documents and manually select the requirements that
they deem to affect their area of design responsibility.
This approach to requirement extraction is highly
susceptible to missing important requirements, and
perhaps even more critical is the risk of not fully
recognizing their importance to the performance of the
system. To overcome these obstacles associated with
unstructured text-based searches, the first step of the
equipment design approach provides two
complementary methods:
1. During development of the PSD and PD decompositions,
each FR/DP pair that influences equipment design is Figure 3. Use of weighted interaction matrix to
immediately recognized and tagged for future extraction
identify PSD equipment FRs.
searches.
2. A general decomposition of an equipment design is used to

Proceedings of the 33rd CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturing Systems, June 5-8, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden. 3

Figure 4. Resultant set of equipment related FRs in
the functional domain of the PSDD.
3.3 Step 2 – Creation of Views
Given the system requirements identified in the
preceding step, they must next be communicated to all
the designers of equipment. An equipment designer is
considered to be any person that participates and
influences the equipment design decomposition. To
effectively communicate the set of equipment FRs,
“views” may be used to represent the requirements
relevant to each designer. In the context of the PSDD, a
view is a subset of PSD DPs with a common design
attribute that all of the equipment related DPs in the set
share (i.e. a reference to fixture design activities). Views
have traceability links back to the PSD equipment FR
and to high level system goals and dependencies with
other requirements. Views can also contain explanations
to augment the basic set of DPs.
Alternate views help to eliminate unnecessary
details that detract from the focus of the designer (i.e.
the rest of the decomposition). They also offer different
perspectives allowing the designer a better
understanding of the system. This greater understanding
of the system is possible because views are traceable to
other system objectives outside of the view.
The creation of a view requires a criteria for
selecting a subset from the total set of equipment
related DPs in the PSDD. There are many possible
types of criteria to extract such a subset. One commonly
used criteria is based on domain experts. In this way,
DPs are allocated to the designer with expertise in the
discipline (i.e. control, mechanical, electrical
engineering). The result is a set of views that are
specific to each one of the possible design disciplines.
The drawback of this type of criteria is that it has limited
effectiveness in projects that depend on a great deal of
multidisciplinary interaction such as in concurrent
engineering. A better criteria is the use of equipment
subsystem domains. Using knowledge from previous
designs, equipment DPs may be grouped into sets
based on subsystems and thus can better integrate a
wide diversity of equipment requirements. An example of
a view for an equipment subsystem is the fixturing
system shown in Figure 5.
Proceedings of the 33rd CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturing Systems, June 5-8, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden. 4
Figure 5. Example of a view of subset of MSD equipment
DPs for fixture design.
Depending on the subsystem, the view may consist of a
simple list of FRs and DPs that the equipment must meet, or
the list may require further explanations to provide context. For
example, the interaction of an operator with a machine may
require supplementary descriptions to fully explain the behavior
of the user interface. Another reason for augmenting the list is
that they have to be understood by management and project
leaders. These people are not involved in detailed design, but
they still require an abstract level of understanding because of
their roles as decision makers. Such lists of requirements with
additional explanations may be used as design guidelines [6].
3.4 Step 3 - Requirements Analysis This step addresses the
need for system requirements to be expressed in a
measurable and verifiable form for detailed equipment design.
Since the PSDD is applied at the concept design stage, many
functional requirements are expressed as objectives and
goals. However, as more information becomes available and
the system design is refined, there is a need to convert these
statements of objectives into forms that are measurable and
verifiable. Detailed subsystem design needs requirement
statements that can be used to check and validate that
equipment meets the requirements of the system. Also,
verifiable requirements are needed to express the relationships
between system FRs and equipment FRs (described in the
example in Section 4).
Furthermore, in this step the PSDD is analyzed to classify
and subsequently convert requirements using a systems
engineering requirements taxonomy developed by Oliver [7].
The taxonomy shown in Figure 6 is part of the systems
engineering process for the assessment phase that deals with
the various sources of information requirements given to
systems designers.
After equipment requirements from the PSDD have been
identified by this classification they may be converted to more
verifiable forms by using formal requirement statements. The
following is an example from FR-P131:
Before: Reduce variability of task completion time.
After: Variability of task completion time shall be < X.
The difficulty with the first statement is that there is no
indication of how much variability should be reduced by
and hence it cannot be verified. The second statement
provides a specific parameter and condition that can be
used to verify whether the requirement is met or not.
This conversion process is repeated for all equipment
FRs in the PSDD.
Figure 6. Associations and classification of
requirements based on available information,
adapted from Oliver [7].
 3.5 Step 4 – Design Decomposition
The fourth step in the approach is the establishment of a
link between the PSDD and an equipment
decomposition(s). Two key elements of this step are the
descriptions of how these decompositions are related to
one another and how the decomposition process is
carried out.
The description of the relation between
decompositions is based on the nature of the PSDD
design parameter hierarchy. This hierarchy is a
combination of DPs ranging from physical entities to
non-physical DPs such as methods and activities. Such
types of DPs lead to a different relation between system
and subsystem decompositions than one from a
conventional product decomposition. The relation
between the system and equipment is one where there
can be multiple equipment decompositions.
The second element in this step is the process
description for how decomposition may be carried out
given the types of DPs described above. First, the
design process for equipment has to incorporate the
production system and product design requirements.
The specific equipment decomposition depends on the
requirements of the system in which it must operate and
therefore all possible sources of requirements must be
considered. Figure 7 gives a descriptive decomposition
model showing that such system requirements
contribute to sub-FRs beyond those inherent solely to
the given piece of equipment. The figure gives the
decomposition of a general equipment DP kED (at an
arbitrary level k in the hierarchy) into a set of equipment,
production system, and product sub-FRs at a lower k+1
level. The two terms in this set FR(PSD) kED+ 1 and
FR(PD) kED+ 1
are read as “the equipment sub-FR
derived from the PSD/PD functional requirement”.
k k
FR ED DP ED
k +1
FR ED FR ( PSD ) ED
k +1 k +1
FR ( PD ) ED
k +1
DP ED DP ( PSD ) ED
k +1
DP ( PD ) ED
Figure 7. Equipment decomposition model with PSD and
PD derived sub-FRs.
The procedure for obtaining these three different types of sub-
FRs terms begins once a DP kED has been
specified to meet the FR kED (note that the procedure for the
sub-FRs derived from PSD and the PD decompositions is the
same). The first type of sub-FR,
FR kED+ 1is solely an equipment derived requirement and is
obtained independently from system considerations. The
decomposition of DP kED into FR(PSD) kED+ 1 begins
identification of a DP in the PSDD that corresponds to DP kED .
If the equipment DP is a major subsystem, then a view will
exist that has been created in the second step of the approach.
This view will contain all of the DPs in the PSDD that reference
Proceedings of the 33rd CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturing Systems, June 5-8, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden. 5
the design of the equipment DP. For lower level detailed
equipment DPs, this search may have to be performed
independently of a view. This identified set of DPs in the PSDD
can then be easily traced back to the source FR. This set of
source FRs in the PSDD that affect equipment design may
now be used to generate the equipment sub-FRs. Sub-FRs are
generated by formulating the PSD level equipment FRs
consistent with the DP kED . For the PSDD presented in this
work, no general method has been found that can be used to
express FRs in the system decomposition as FRs in the
equipment decomposition. However, it has been observed that
if there exists a relationship between the PSDD FR and an
equipment variable, then such a variable can be used to
express the equipment sub-FR, namely FR(PSD) kED+ 1.
4 EQUIPMENT DESIGN EXAMPLE
The following example is taken from the design decomposition
of a tool turret for setup reduction. The tool turret is a major
subsystem of a CNC lathe and is the structure that holds tools
and indexes to the position for the cutting operation specified
by the process plan. In Figure 8, DP1 – Tool turret satisfies
FR1 – Hold tools for machining operations. The first step is to
use DP1 to either search for a similar DP in the PSDD or to
use a view previously created in Step 2 of the equipment
design approach. In this case, the DP from the PSDD that is
identified is DP-T12 Design quick changeover for material
handling and equipment because the turret is a subsystem that
must be reconfigured during a changeover from a production
run of one part type to the next. The functional requirement
that DP-T12 satisfies is FR-T12 Ability to produce sufficiently
small run size. The run size, FR-T12 may be specified in
different ways according to the design selected for the
manufacturing system. In a make-to-stock manufacturing
system, the lot size (or run size as defined here) is determined
by minimizing the total inventory cost which is the sum of the
ordering, purchasing, and holding costs [8]. The optimal run
size q* (Equation 4.1) commonly known as the Economic
Order Quantity (EOQ) is a function of the setup cost K, holding
cost h and annual demand D. The setup cost K is a function of
the setup time taken to changeover production resources.
k +1
2KD
q* = (4.1) h
Alternatively, JIT manufacturing is a make-to-order
system design that determines run size using a different
approach. JIT seeks to meet customer demand by
producing the correct mix and quantity of actual
customer demand and therefore setup time is regarded
as a variable which must be reduced to meet such a
production plan. Monden [9] uses a queuing model for a
JIT system with a mixed model production schedule to
determine the optimal run size. Using this approach he
calculates the optimal run size q* given by equation 4.2:
S
q* = (4.2)
(2 − 2)t'− t
where S = setup time, t’ = average time for consuming
one part in subsequent process, and t = unit processing
time per part.
with the In both system design cases, the run size is a
function of the setup time. This functional dependence
implies that a subsystem parameter determines a higher
level system requirement. However, the top-down
system approach of the PSDD instead first specifies
 what the run size q* should be to maximize customer
satisfaction by meeting the required mix and quantity of
products demanded. After q* is first specified, the
required setup time may then be communicated to
equipment designers. Thus, the equipment sub-FR must
express the setup time requirement as a function of q*
(indicated by the dashed line in Figure 8). The
decomposition is then stated as DP1 decomposes into
FR14 – Changeover time shall be S which is in turn
satisfied by DP14 – Tool clamping mechanism.
[5] Whitney, D.E., 1993, “Nippondenso Co. Ltd: A case study
of strategic product design.”, Research in Engineering
Design-Theory Applications & Concurrent Engineering,
Vol.5, No.1, pp.1-20.
[6] Arinez, J.F., Collins, M.T., Cochran, D.S., Uhl, M.D.,
Cook, P., 1999, “Design of an Automotive Compressor
Production System Using Lean Manufacturing Design
Guidelines”, Proceedings of the 1999 SAE International
Automotive Manufacturing Conference, IAM99-34.
[7] Oliver, D.W., Kelliher, T.P., Keegan, J.G., Engineering
Complex Systems with Models and Objects, McGraw-Hill,
1997.
[8] Winston, W., Operations Research – Applications and
Algorithms, Duxbury Press, 3rd Ed., 1994.
[9] Monden, Y., Toyota Production System” Industrial
Engineering and Management Press, 2nd Ed., 1993.

Figure 8 Illustration of Step 4 of the equipment

design approach showing decomposition process
for tool turret design.

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5 SUMMARY
The design of equipment to operate effectively in a production
system involves consideration of a wide diversity of
requirements. At the concept design phase, structured design
methods are important to organize and communicate system
objectives and goals to equipment designers. The production
system decomposition presented provides such structure and
improved understanding to designers because detailed
requirements are decomposed from these high-level system
objectives. The proposed equipment design approach can then
be used to formulate system objectives as equipment
requirements.

6 REFERENCES
[1] Suh, N.P., Cochran, D.S., Lima, P.C., 1998,
"Manufacturing System Design", in 48th General
Assembly of CIRP, Annals of the CIRP, Vol.47/2, pp. 627-
639.
[2] Hatamura, Y., The Practice of Machine Design, Clarendon
Press, 1999.
[3] Cochran, D.S., 1999, "The Production System Design and
Deployment Framework," SAE Technical paper 1999-01-
1644, SAE IAM-99 Conference.
[4] Suh, N. P., Principles of Design, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990.

Proceedings of the 33rd CIRP International Seminar on Manufacturing Systems, June 5-8, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden. 6