A Resilient and Time-Efficient Approach to Product Development Through Availability-Based Design (ABD)

The conventional design process (CDP) considers availability issues at the latest stages of the overall machine design project. Designers’ contributions are focused on technical and quality aspects. In most instances, other teams within the supply chain address delivery issues separately. Yet, current machine design projects are severely bound by deadlines, volatile, and sometimes uncertain. Due to the iterative nature of the design process itself, the number of potential design combinations is large. Their inherent technical checks and evaluations are highly time-consuming. In this paper, to avoid unnecessary design effort, the availability of components is considered at the early stages of the design process. This paper presents the Availability Based Design (ABD), which reorders the design process steps to preclude achieving a design that would be incompatible with the delivery time constraints. A ball screw drive actuator is used as a reference case study to quantitatively compare the performance of ABD to the CDP. The influence of key parameters is studied, including the availability ratio, the automation of key steps of the design process, the number of families of components and the number of technical checks necessary for validating a design. The performance assessment shows that ABD reduces the design time for availability ratios below 0.8 in manual design, and that automating the method makes ABD systematically faster than the CDP.