Design for logistics in set-based concurrent engineering environment

Design for Logistics (DFL) and Set-based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) are two conventionally separated methodologies for product design. The former intends to design products by taking into consideration the logistics system that the product needs to fit in, whereas the latter explores a set of design alternatives to converge on a final specification for both product and processes. Within the scheme of integrating DFL and SBCE, we develop a decision support framework to estimate logistics time and cost for a set of design alternatives and determine the best design by making tradeoff between these two performance measures. In the proposed framework, High Level Petri Nets, Activity Based Costing, and TOPSIS are applied for the necessary functions.