15.1 Introduction

So, what does the future hold for engineering development?

The means by which new, technology‐based products are created, and then brought to market, have a history extending back at least 200 years, or much longer, if taking a broader view of what constitutes an engineering ‘product’. From one point of view, this creative process has remained unchanged over this period. It comprises: find out what might be useful, create an idea, refine and test it, make it, then monitor it in use. However, nothing in life is simple; technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, customers have become more affluent and demanding, and the world has become a smaller place, creating bigger markets but also facilitating competition.

The process of developing new technologies, and hence new products, is likely in the future to be influenced by a continuation of these trends, including, more specifically:

• Advances in the methods used in the product development process itself. This includes how new technologies and products are defined, analysed, modelled, developed and tested before entering service.
• Adoption of new materials and product technologies. Continuing the trend of decades, if not centuries, involves potentially new combinations, such as conventional engineering, biotechnology, and intelligent systems.
• Constraints and opportunities. Both come in relation to energy, environmental factors, and materials availability.
• Developments in manufacturing systems. These are becoming more complex and distributed but are capable of producing a much wider variety of products, in turn, affecting product development processes.
• Increasing demands from customers. Demands could come from individual consumers or businesses, greater competition, and new models of business.
• Product connectivity. Products are connected to either the owner or the manufacturer from the field of operation.

These overlapping drivers of change are discussed briefly and individually in this chapter. Their likely impacts on engineering development activities are suggested.

15.2 Product Development Technologies

Product definition information has completely migrated from paper‐based to digital forms, and integrated into business‐wide systems. However, there is more to come from digital methods of product definition. They will have to be developed further to cope with more complex and distributed methods of design and manufacture combined with fluid supply chain partnerships. Methods of workflow management and data sharing will support the development of global teams.

The products themselves will exhibit more variety to cater for individual customer needs, including the provision of bespoke designs where the manufacturer provides a design and visualisation sales tool, much as is currently done with domestic kitchens, rather than an off‐the‐shelf solution.

The creative side of product design will be enhanced and accelerated by further developments and cost reduction in visualisation tools, including augmented or virtual reality technologies. The same technologies could also be used to optimise design for manufacture and as a training tool for manufacture and service.

There is also the possibility of wider use of automated design optimisation tools where the engineer specifies the envelope for a component design and the design system runs through multiple iterations to find the optimal solution. Known as ‘generative design’, this process can mimic biological evolution but over a period of seconds rather than millennia. This would improve upon design optimisation by manual trial‐and‐error. Whether it could be extended into the use of artificial intelligence, including the ability to learn, remains to be seen.

Modelling and simulation technologies are at the heart of product development and have progressed from relatively simple applications, such as static structures, to more complex problems, such as fluid flow and system dynamics. These technologies will continue to develop, enabling more complex analyses and the ability to explore the interaction between separate systems – previously the domain of the first physical prototypes. ‘Multi‐physics’ methods are developing where, for example, structures, fluid flow, and thermal analyses can be conducted in parallel using the same basic models. The aim is more thorough analysis ahead of physical tests and analysis of difficult or dangerous conditions. As always, a challenge will be identifying the correct way to construct accurate models and verifying the accuracy of simulation, not just producing results which present well.

Further developments aim to make complex analyses more usable by nonspecialist staff (analysis specialists are one of the most common bottlenecks in product development projects), which would also encourage use in earlier stages of projects and use more frequently, which in turn would help learning. This is sometimes described as ‘democratising’ modelling and simulation.

Products in service will generate much more operational data, which clearly is useful in optimising development processes – see Section 15.5.

Much is made of the development of autonomous products. As well as solving the technical problems of how products might have the intelligence to ‘self‐drive’, ways will have to be found to validate and gain regulatory acceptance of products with such potentially unpredictable characteristics and new modes of failure.

Further challenges will come in the area of human organisation: how to integrate more complex and dispersed participants in a development programme; how to develop the skills for a wider range of technology integration, requiring in‐depth expertise on the one hand and broader system integration skills on the other; and simply how the waste‐avoidance principles of ‘lean thinking’ can be applied to these complex human systems so that they perform efficiently and are capable of being managed. It will be interesting to see whether simulation and modelling can be used to model engineering programmes in much the same way as factory production systems can already be modelled.

15.3 New Materials and Product Technologies

New technologies will continue to be generated and assimilated into products, as has always been the case in the past. Whilst this process will present challenges on a case‐by‐case basis, the practical adoption of new technologies is not fundamentally new and is one of the basic challenges of engineering. The area where some difficulty might be expected is where technologies are combined in unusual ways. For example, grafting intelligence or autonomy onto otherwise predictable mechanical or electrical products cuts across conventional thinking and methods of analysis. Some medical products, an expanding market, might include a biological element, ‘grown’ rather than manufactured. Similarly, algae‐based solar cells and fuel cells have been proposed, also combining biology with electrical engineering. Nanotechnologies represent another radically different area that will be combined with conventional technologies.

15.4 Energy, Environmental, and Materials Availability

There will be continuing pressure to reduce the energy consumption of products during their service, driven first by operating economics and second by legislation to encourage low‐carbon or low‐energy solutions

Environmental legislation will continue to tighten, placing lower limits on emissions such as carbon dioxide and oxides of nitrogen as well as reduced limits on hazardous wastes from manufacturing processes and limitations on the use of potentially carcinogenic materials in the products themselves. New hazards may be identified and may become the subject of future legislation.

Relatively scarce or expensive materials are now being more widely used in applications such as electronics, photovoltaics, catalysts, magnets, motors, generators, batteries, fuel cells, and mobile phones. The materials used include rare earth elements, rhodium, indium, gold, palladium, and platinum. The quantities per unit are very small, but their role is critical to the functioning of the devices. It is unlikely that supplies of any of these materials will actually run out. However, prices could rise unacceptably, some are by‐products of extraction of more common materials, and some have security of supply issues, coming from politically difficult countries. The latter point also affects some less‐scarce materials such as lithium.

These factors will drive programmes of material substitution. They will also encourage closed‐loop approaches where these materials are recycled with minimal loss, rather than being ‘single use’. In fact, there will be growing business and engineering opportunities in developing systems for recovering these scarce materials such as already exists for recovering platinum‐group metals from automotive catalysts.

15.5 Manufacturing Systems

The future development path of manufacturing systems over the coming decades is a huge and complex subject in its own right, and the following paragraphs can barely scratch the surface of it. At the level of the machine or cell, information processing is assuming as much importance as physical, manufacturing processing; the term ‘cyber‐physical systems’ is used to describe facilities exhibiting this combination. Automation in this context should be considered as a complete system, rather than the individual machine or cell. Adaptive methods of manufacture, including but not limited additive/3D‐printing, will replace ‘hard’ automation.

The driver for this is the further subdivision of supply chains to provide distributed, adaptive, and multipurpose manufacturing rather than the monolithic approach taken traditionally to high‐volume/low‐cost production. From a customer's viewpoint, it will provide the opportunity for tailor‐made products at mass manufacturing prices.

These developments will clearly have their impact on how the products, which are processed through the manufacturing systems, are designed in the first place and how the product information is presented. Whilst design‐for‐manufacture, in the sense of optimising designs to the physical manufacturing process, will still be important, products will also have to be configured in a way that optimises information flows – ‘design for IT’. Designs and information will have to facilitate local manufacture, optimise material and energy use, and support multiple suppliers. More particularly, rather than there being one design to be made by the million, ways will need to be found of designing (and developing, proving, and signing off) a wide range of similar products, capable of personalisation.

A McKinsey report of 2013 (Ref. 1) summarises this very well:

The new era of manufacturing will be marked by highly agile, networked enterprises that use information and analytics as skilfully as they employ talent and machinery to deliver products and services to diverse global markets.

15.6 Customer Demands

At the simplest level, customers will continue to expect increasing levels of performance and feature levels at reducing levels of real cost, whilst engineers will continue to develop technologies that can meet these needs, or create new ones. As noted above, customer choice and bespoke designs are further areas of increasing expectation. However, another important driver of change will be new models of ownership.

Industrial customers are increasingly buying the product as a service where the supplier provides the effect of the product, rather than the product itself. Examples where this is currently practised include railway trains, compressed air, document copying, lighting, and aero‐engines. The customer buys, for example, compressed air by the cubic metre, rather than investing in a compressed air system, which becomes the responsibility of the supplier.

In technology development terms, the product must then be instrumented and connected back to the supplier to provide usage data and be developed alongside the appropriate business model and financing arrangements. In some industrial sectors, service revenue now makes up 50% of total revenue. Changes in business models will drive product development organisations into wider involvement in business matters, beyond developing the product itself.

Another example is shared ownership models where the product is hired – already common practice in many sectors, such as automobiles, but extending into areas such as bicycles. In this situation, the product is likely to be used more intensively and possibly be subject to more misuse, requiring the design rules for the product, and its development programme, to be amended to meet the new usage situation.

15.7 Connected Products

To an increasing extent, products will be connected to manufacturers, operators, or owners via the Internet using computing devices embedded in those products, thus enabling them to send and receive data. The ‘Internet of Things’ will enable a wide range of new possibilities, including health monitoring, failure prediction, performance optimisation, and remote management. These capabilities must clearly be designed into products from the outset and the data communication systems developed alongside the product itself.

These technologies will obviously generate large quantities of data – ‘Big Data’ – where the volumes of information exceed the capabilities of traditional methods of analysis. There will therefore be an increasing role for ‘data scientists’ in product development organisations.

If ways can be found of structuring and analysing this information, it could provide the basis of better‐optimised designs based on a more thorough understanding of usage. However, care must be taken before design rules, built up over many years of practical experience, are rewritten. Regulators, in particular, will need to be persuaded that new approaches are safe. At the same time, these technologies will present cybersecurity challenges (see, e.g. Ref. 2).

15.8 Concluding Points

New technologies will continue to drive the creation of new products and services, as has been the case for decades, if not centuries. They will also impact the processes by which those products and services are created. As well as affecting methods of definition, analysis and testing – the bread and butter of product development – they will also affect, rather fundamentally, the way that products are made, their subsequent connectivity, and the services associated with them. This, in turn, will broaden the process of product development from the simply designing and making a product towards the creation of partnerships over the lifetime of the product.

Hence, the skills of product development will become correspondingly broader. At the same time, more specialists will be needed in new areas such as data science. In an ideal situation, this will need what are sometimes described as ‘T‐shaped’ engineers – capable of handling a broad range of disciplines but competent, in‐depth, in one speciality. Whether these two needs can ever be met in one person is a matter of debate, but part of the fun of engineering is grappling with incompatible requirements!

References

There is relatively little material about how product development processes are likely to evolve over time, but there is a lot about future manufacturing systems, which can be used to judge the likely path for manufacturing businesses generally. Two which are worth reading are:

1. 1 Manyika, J., Sinclair, J., Dobbs, R. et al. (2013). Manufacturing the Future: The Next Era of Global Growth and Innovation. McKinsey Global Institute Available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/manufacturing/the_future_of_manufacturing.
2. 2 Foresight (2013). The Future of Manufacturing: A new era of opportunity and challenge for the UK – Summary Report The Government Office for Science, London Available at: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/255923/13‐810‐future‐manufacturing‐summary‐report.pdf

In addition, some of the engineering software and analysis companies have ‘white papers’ on how they see their products evolving over time.