Professor Ozturk’s New Springer Article Explores Design for eXcellence (DfX)

How will products be designed in the age of smart factories? Professor U. Aytun Ozturk examines this question in a new co-authored article, "Design for excellence in the era of industry 4.0–DfX4.0," published by Springer in the International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management.

Written with researchers from the University of Lodz in Poland and the University of Zagreb in Croatia, the study reviews how Design for eXcellence, a family of methods used to address factors such as cost, quality, sustainability, manufacturability, and usability during product development, is evolving in response to Industry 4.0 technologies.

The article provides an overview of potential directions for design and engineering in future smart manufacturing environments. It catalogs seventy-seven established Design for eXcellence methods and forty-seven emerging approaches associated with technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and additive manufacturing, including 3D printing. It also proposes the concept of "DfX4.0" to organize these developments and consider how product design may change in increasingly digital and connected manufacturing environments.