
Kevin Norbert OttoUniversity of Melbourne | MSD · Department of Mechanical Engineering
Kevin Norbert Otto
PhD
About
234
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Introduction
Statistical methods, machine learning and optimization in quality control and robust design. Modularity and platforms.
Additional affiliations
September 2012 - September 2015
September 2012 - September 2015
September 1993 - January 2001
Publications
Publications (234)
Managing the waste of decommissioned complex systems (e.g., aircraft, wind turbines, etc.) is a growing issue. In this review, we investigate repurposing as a potential solution. The objectives are to identify strategies that can enable repurposing and identify the research gaps hindering those strategies. We analyzed 104 journal articles published...
Repurposing is a decommissioning strategy that enables multiple life cycles for a product or its components. However, repurposing is challenging since it requires finding an alternative use for an existing product. Therefore, a starting point to analyze a product in the context of repurposing is required. We aim to fill this gap by developing a Rep...
The Circular Economy aims to replace the current linear “cradle to grave” product life cycle approach with a more circular “cradle to cradle” approach which is driven by design or “circular design”. This is done by circulating the product components back at the end of life through circular design strategies such as reuse, repurpose, remanufacturing...
With advancing digitalization, new technologies with more and more digital components make it necessary to integrate new components into current and future products. Sensors and actuators, such as motors, emit electromagnetic and thermal fields that can greatly affect product performance. Recent work has considered fields at the functional level us...
Direct part-markings (DPMs) can be formed into metal castings, using additively manufactured two-dimensional matrix encoded tags (AM2D) placed in a sand or shell mold. It has been unclear how thin a part can be and yet form a readable DPM. There must be sufficient molten metal to burn away the tag, and sufficient feeding pressure to form the 2D mat...
Modularization is an approach for system architecting and design simplification by encapsulating complex interactions among components within modules and reducing dependencies across modules. Design structure matrix (DSM) based clustering algorithms have proven helpful for such analysis, owing to their convenience in manipulating a large number of...
The Smart Foundry concept promises benefits of improved foundry supply chain quality, more sustainable metal processing, and improved customer support. A significant need includes automated data gathering and visualization of the data. In metal foundries regardless of manufacturing small parts in mass production or big parts in small production, me...
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a global disruption, but little is known about how it impacted product development. Based on interviews of 24 practicing product development leaders, we find that COVID-19 generated a unique combination of external and internal uncertainties and thus had several direct impacts on product development. Initial adaptatio...
This study aimed at identifying applications of learning curve (LC) modeling at individual, group, and organizational levels in Industry 4.0 (I4.0) environments. For that, a scoping review on four databases was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guideline...
Online reward-based crowdfunding campaigns have emerged as an innovative approach for validating demands, discovering early adopters, and seeking learning and feedback in the design processes of innovative products. However, crowdfunding campaigns for innovative products are faced with a high degree of uncertainty and suffer meager rates of success...
Product developers are faced with the challenge of covering an ever-increasing external variety with as little internal variety as possible. Modular product architectures offer one way of resolving the challenge. They have an impact on all life phases and on economic targets. These effects are represented in the Impact Model of Modular Product Fami...
Low-pressure die cast (LPDC) is widely used in high performance, precision aluminum alloy automobile wheel castings, where defects such as porosity voids are not permitted. The quality of LPDC parts is highly influenced by the casting process conditions. A need exists to optimize the process variables to improve the part quality against difficult d...
Statistical quality control is used in foundries to identify special cause defects and root causes by correlating process input variations with casting defects. A difficulty exists in associating process data collected with individual cast parts as the parts are processed through the foundry and then out into the supply chain. Typically, alphanumer...
We study the use of Hessian interaction terms to quickly identify design variables that reduce variability of system performance. To start we quantify the uncertainty and compute the variance decomposition to determine noise variables that contribute most, all at an initial design. Minimizing the uncertainty is next sought, though probabilistic opt...
Robust design methods have expanded from experimental techniques to include sampling methods, sensitivity analysis and probabilistic optimisation. Such methods typically require many evaluations. We study design and noise variable cross-term second derivatives of a response to quickly identify design variables that reduce response variability. We f...
Statistical quality control is applied in factories and foundries to identify special cause defects and to identify root causes through statistical correlation of process input variations to defects. A difficulty arises in associating process data collected with individual cast parts as they are worked through the foundry and out into the supply ch...
Online reward-based crowdfunding campaigns have emerged as an innovative approach for validating demands, discovering early adopters, and seeking learning and feedback in the design processes of innovative products. However, crowdfunding campaigns for innovative products are faced with a high degree of uncertainty and suffer meager rates of success...
Computer tools are commonly used to assess designs. We develop a toolchain using open source code libraries in Python to provide an open source, interactive robust design improvement toolchain. A reference folder contains a script that reads an input parameter value file and runs the simulation. The toolchain executes uncertainty quantification ste...
Research in modularization of product families reveals numerous individual cause and effect impacts of modularity on the firm. While many modularization methods are present in the literature, an overall combined picture of the interrelations of modular product structures on the firm is yet missing. This makes the construction of an economic busines...
System architecture and modularity decisions are inherent to preliminary concept design. Prior modularity research has considered minimizing interactions between modules and increasing the commonality among modular product variants. Effective approaches include function structure partitioning guidelines, affinity analysis or matrix clustering algor...
Diagnosing faulty performance deviations of electro-mechanical systems can be difficult, given the multitude of components and features which could contribute as root causes. Yet this is often a problem in manufacturing, where only some of the units built do not meet performance requirements only some of the time. In this context, product and proce...
The field of design research has been expanding into a wide diverse range of multidisciplinary topics. It takes substantial time for young researchers to attain a cumulative overview of state of the art on ever more complex methodologies. Teaching doctoral candidates in summer schools is an approach being taken by the design society to support them...
The design of systems today often involves computer simulation to assess performance and design margins. Understanding how variability erases design margin is important to assure adequacy of margins, especially in optimization efforts. In this paper, we develop a toolchain using open source code libraries in Python, and encapsulate it in Jupyter no...
Design for Assembly (DFA) is the process by which a product is designed to be easily assembled, and in which creative approaches are employed for component reduction and combination. Such design simplifications are accomplished through reducing the number of operations required to assemble the product, improving the handling of each component, and/...
The uncertainty of operating conditions such as weather and payload cause variations in the energy demand of electric city buses. Uncertain variation in energy demand is a challenge in the design of charging systems and on-board energy storages. To predict the energy demand, a computationally efficient model is required for real-time applications....
This chapter is another verification simulation using the same ADI surrogate except for a different executive decision—to maximize annual operating income (AOI). This a decision to deal with internal operations. The goal is to demonstrate to the industry and its employees that the executive managers of the firm and competent and are able to run ADI...
This chapter is an introduction to Part III, the third step in our presentation of our paradigm and prescriptive methodology. This first chapter of Part III is our first real business-enterprise case study executed in the field. Whereas in Part II, we used the ADI system dynamics model as a surrogate to verify functionality, we now go to field in t...
This is the second chapter of Part III. We engage with a real world customer to verify the efficacy of our methodology. In the previous chapter, we worked with HiTEM, a high- technology contract manufacturer of electronics components. In this chapter, we report our work with a world-class e-business service company, eSvcs Japan, eSvcsJ for short. T...
Macro-economists cannot expect governments or central banks to use them as test objects for their theories. Likewise, we cannot expect firms to submit themselves as test subjects to verify the functionality of our prescriptive paradigm. Therefore we simulate with a surrogate of a real company. The surrogate is system dynamics model of ADI, a high t...
We introduce the conceptual and theoretical foundations of our prescriptive paradigm for robust decisions. Whereas decision-making is an event, executive decision management is a life-cycle of a complex of five spaces. The five spaces are: The Problem Space, Solution Space, Operations Space, Performance Space and the Commitment Space. Consistent wi...
We will unpack this question very systematically and rigorously. First, we make clear that this question cannot not be addressed as if discussing a light bulb, a used car, or a radio. To answer “does it work” in a meaningful and thoughtful way, we adopt the approach used by pharmaceutical companies. Demonstrating that a drug works is a stringent pr...
This chapter is a challenging case study that deals with national security. The strategic decision is about the size and structure of the US Navy for the year 2037. This case itself is a grand gedanken experiment done with experts. This case is demanding because it is very multidimensional. We had to consider geopolitical issues, economics, recent...
This chapter introduces the extant decision theories. Whereas the literature segments the field into the Normative, Descriptive, and Prescriptive theories, we identify a fourth. That is the Declarative strand of decision-making. We discuss all four strands of research and praxis. We locate our prescriptive paradigm in the Prescriptive segment. We d...
This chapter introduces the motivations of executive-decision synthesis and narrates our systematic prescriptive paradigm for their robust design. The locus of our prescriptive paradigm is at the intersection of messy complex systems, engineering design and executive decisions. Synthesis of robust executive decisions draws from these three fields a...
We have two goals for this chapter. The first is to present a summary of the key ideas of our prescriptive decision paradigm. Second is to state the overarching concepts of our paradigm. These concepts are “like the skeleton, which, invisible to the naked eye, gives form and function to the body” (Morgenthau, Politics among nations. Alferd A. Knopf...
Energy powered devices often contain sufficient energy levels to require safety considerations. These are typically addressed in latter design phases through failure and safety assessments and mitigation strategies, after the concept is determined and design freedom is restricted. We introduce here an approach to consider safety in the early, initi...
The use of computers during the design process continues to grow, calling for a better understanding of how experts make use of computer tools to automate and augment their design efforts. In this study, we examine how architects and engineers consider the use of computers and computation in planning a solution to a sample design problem. We find t...
The prediction of electric city bus energy demand is crucial in order to estimate operating costs and to size components such as the battery and charging systems. Unfortunately, there are unpredictable dynamic factors that can cause variation in the energy demand, particularly concerning driver choices and traffic levels. The impact of these factor...
Ten years prior to this paper, innovative mechanical products were analyzed and found to embody multiple innovation characteristics - an average of two more than competing products in the marketplace. At the time, it was not known whether these products would be successful over time and whether the number or type of innovation characteristics would...
According to various embodiments, there is provided a robot including: a spherical shell; a cart in the spherical shell, the cart including a plurality of wheels rotatable to move the cart along an inner surface of the spherical shell; a sensor coupled to the cart, the sensor configured to provide an inertial measurement of the cart; a motion encod...
In this paper, we introduce a principled method for product modularization that incorporates embodiment constraints due to different levels of fields in the product. In particular, we introduce the concept of a constraints matrix that determines which elements should and which elements should not to be placed together in a same module. Entries of t...
The occurrence rates and cost impact of design changes made early and later in the design process were studied, to test and quantify the 80-20 rule of design cost impacts, that early design decisions account for the majority of costs in a development program. Cost and schedule impact of decisions made throughout the development process was carried...
Assigning components and functions to modules early can facilitate faster and higher quality results in the latter stages of development and manufacturing. Methods have been developed to suggest suitable architectures using a variety of metrics that measure the ideality of the modularity. However, different modularity criteria considered are often...
Analogy-making has been deemed one of the core cognitive mechanisms which play a role in human creative thinking activities such as design and art. Designers can make use of analogies in various stages of design including ideation, planning and evaluation. However, human analogy-making is limited by experience and reliance of human memory on superf...
Research into product modularity has created methods to partition a product system in to modules, including DSM algorithms to minimize various within- or between-module connectivity assumptions, as well as heuristic methods for combining functions into common modules, including dominant flow, convert-transmit, repeated elements, and branching flows...
Analogy-making has been deemed one of the core cognitive mechanisms which play a role in human creative thinking activities such as design and art. Designers can make use of analogies in various stages of design including ideation, planning and evaluation. However, human analogy-making is limited by experience and reliance of human memory on superf...
Prototyping is interwoven with nearly all product, service, and systems development efforts. A prototype is a pre-production representation of some aspect of a concept or final design. Prototyping often predetermines a large portion of resource deployment in development and influences design project success. This review surveys literature sources i...
To achieve increasing emission requirements, the cruise ship industry is working to develop higher efficiency ships. Cruise ships are different from other ship types in their relatively higher consumption of electrical power, steam and hot water. Several novel high-efficiency system concepts are possible for on-board electrical power generation and...
To better understand the impact of early versus late design decisions, a study was undertaken on the root causes of missed requirements in new product development and their impact on development cost through rework activities. The context is the industrial development of unmanned aerial vehicles. The aim is to understand the occurrence rate of miss...
Multidisciplinary optimization (MDO) methods have become mature as commercial and open-source toolboxes and applications have been developed and distributed in Nordic countries and elsewhere. Typically, engineers formulate concept design problems using multiple system-level responses to allow simultaneous optimization along a Pareto trade-off front...
Modularity is an approach to manage the design of complex systems by partitioning and assigning elements of a concept to simpler subsystems according to a planned architecture. Functional-flow heuristics suggest possible modules that have been demonstrated in past products, but using them still leaves it to the designer to choose which heuristics m...
User behavior can determine over one third of the energy consumed in the residential energy market. Thus, user behavior has become a primary focus in sustainable mechanical device, appliance, and smart-energy systems design. Wasteful user behaviors, termed energy overuse failure modes (EOFMs), offer an opportunity for design engineers to direct use...
Modularity is a key design research area of the Nordic countries, with a history of intensive work over the last twenty years. In the last decade, there has been considerable research in product modularity, measuring the level of modularity and various procedures for searching for ideal modular architectures. Different manual heuristics and compute...
Modular product platforms have been shown to provide substantial cost and time savings while still allowing companies to offer a variety of products. As a result, a multitude of product platform methods have been developed over the last decade within the design research community. However, comparison and integration of suitable methods is difficult...
This paper describes the design and evaluation
of a Legged Piezoelectric Miniature Robot (LPMR) propelled
by standing wave locomotion where the vibrations of legs
are similar to the bounding gait locomotion of animals. The
LPMR comprises of one piezoelectric patch, a metal beam, two
contact joints, two rigid legs and contains all necessary power
el...
As additive manufacturing (AM) has broadened design freedom significantly, conventional design theories and methodologies for customization or mass customization are challenged. This research aims at developing a user-centered design methodology for additively manufactured interactive parts that improves the level of customization. We propose a des...
Early design intent can be compromised as decisions transition in the design process from early concepts to prototyping and to the final specification. This paper presents a method to support designers in the decision making process in the design of innovative products. Bearing selection in kinetic design is used to demonstrate how implementation d...
This research aims to develop a set of new formal design representations that captures design requirements to improve the level of personalisation while taking advantage of the additive manufacturing (AM)-enabled design freedom. We propose a formal design process structure called design for AM-facilitated personalisation that merges design for pers...
Design and other fundamental topics in engineering are often isolated to dedicated courses. An opportunity exists to foster a culture of engineering design and multidisciplinary problem solving throughout the curriculum. Designettes, charettelike design challenges, are rapid and creative learning tools that enable educators to integrate design lear...
In precision robotic applications, inaccuracy in workpiece geometry has been a common problem to the precise processing of the workpiece. Due to manufacturing defects and workpiece deformation, the actual geometry of the workpiece deviates from its nominal 3D CAD model which is defined as model error. For many of the existing industrial robotic app...
Crowdfunding is an emerging phenomenon where entrepreneurs publicize their product concepts to raise development funding and collect design feedback directly from potential supporters. Many innovative products have raised a significant amount of crowdfunding. This paper analyzes the crowd-funded products to develop design guidelines for crowdfundin...
Pose estimation and trajectory tracking of a spherical rolling robot is a complex problem owing to kinematics and dynamics of the system and the constraint of not being able to add range sensors like ultrasonic or infrared distance sensors on the robot. The pose estimate for the robot under study, needs to be derived purely using inertial measureme...
Product modularity has been the subject of considerable research and debate in last decade. Various metrics have been proposed in design community to measure the level of modularity and various procedures have been developed to search for ideal modular architectures. These procedures are based on either manual heuristics or computer clustering algo...
This paper presents a systematic approach for identifying feasible robot base placement regions within a workcell, and evaluating performance of industrial robots for the design of mobile industrial robotic system to perform collision-free automated welding of large intersecting cylindrical pipe structures. First, a mathematical model based on the...
Crowdfunding is an emerging phenomenon where entrepreneurs publicize their product concepts to raise development funding and collect design feedback directly from potential supporters. Many innovative products have raised a significant amount of crowdfunding. This paper analyzes the crowd-funded products to develop design guidelines for crowdfundin...
Many have considered that innovation through new and small companies is a vital driver for sustainable economic growth. Recent growth in Web 2.0 demands small companies to further incorporate risk management while developing innovative products. How to balance risk and innovation during new product development becomes a priority for small companies...
This paper is concerned with pose (position and orientation) estimation of robotic end-effectors under low speed motion where its acceleration is far less than the gravity. An Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) is designed to fuse measurements from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a SE(3) measurement system. The IMU consists of a tri-axis accelerom...
1989 and established a computational and experimental laboratory for research in engineering design and manufacturing, in addition to a teaching laboratory for prototyping, reverse engineering measurements, and testing. Abstract Capstone design courses are intended to provide a culminating experience for senior undergraduate engineering majors. Uni...