Our research is framed within the “ubiquitous digital and connectivity era” that has led to numerous transformations in the industrial landscape, especially in designed products and their development. Thanks to digital and connectivity technologies, products can now evolve towards multidisciplinary products, fitted with new capacities and functions. These multidisciplinary products, as we define them, emerge from the integration of contributions from mechanical, electrical, electronic, software, and information and communication technologies. In this work, mechatronic products, cyber-physical systems, and “smart” products are especially considered for their multidisciplinary nature.
This product evolution induces two types of complexity, product intrinsic complexity and the complexity related to the organization required for its development. In this sense, it is expected that companies adapt how they develop these products. Product development adaptation relies on a variety of “concepts and techniques” (a formulation that encompasses the approaches, processes, methods and tools) which can be organized to form what has been termed in this work a “development structure”. Accordingly, our research focuses on the link between the product and the associated development structure to be deployed. However, due to the monodisciplinary anchoring of most concepts and techniques, the generation of a structure tailored to multidisciplinary products remains a challenge for many companies. Consequently, a support for product developers seems necessary. This support would involve both a cartography of the scientific literature to identify development structures and an understanding of how companies are currently developing their multidisciplinary products. These scientific literature and industrial practice facets have guided the elaboration of our proposition.
The major contributions of this work include the following. First, it proposes a four-level model for structuring development, based on definitions and a decision tree to organize the concepts and techniques in approaches, processes, methods and tools. It then establishes graphical representations, called “cartographies”, of the development of mechatronic products, cyber-physical systems and smart products, before synthesizing them into a multidisciplinary product development cartography. These cartographies represent the concepts and techniques discussed in the literature for the development of multidisciplinary products, as well as the existing links between them, in order to identify the structures, or fragments of structures, already constituted and documented. Another major contribution of our work lies in the analysis of industrial practices through semi-structured interviews. This data collection allowed us to establish the cartographies of the concepts and techniques used by 10 companies to organize their multidisciplinary product developments. The way in which companies have evolved their practices has also been analyzed, through the adaptation or selection of new development practices.
Furthermore, the divergences and similarities between the scientific literature recommendations and the way companies actually work were highlighted. On the strength of these observations, guidelines are proposed for the elaboration of a development structure. These guidelines rely on an audit to establish a cartography of the present practices as well as on the identification of the challenges related to the development of multidisciplinary products. Finally, the elaboration of the proposed structure is based on the association between the challenges encountered and the concepts and techniques depicted in the scientific literature cartographies. These guidelines were applied at an agricultural equipment manufacturer to support its evolution towards multidisciplinary products. Our work is positioned as a cornerstone aiming to better support companies that seek to take advantage of the possibilities offered by digital and connectivity technologies through the proposition of a development structure adapted to their products’ evolution.