A new Heuristic for Preventing nowadays modern Machine Design Failures

Modern Machine Designs have not only to be pursued on many different antagonist technical constraints in order to meet their "technical viability", "technical reliability", to enter a targeted budget but also to be delivered within a given shorter and shorter delay. To solve the first technical requirements, some original systematic methodologies (VDI 2221 to VDI 2223) have been usefully proposed and were also later completed by a rational cost approach (VDI 2225), the goals being to adequately and systematically qualify the technical and the economical relevance of new Designs by identifying and weighting their requested main and auxiliary functions. Materials play there a decisive role too. Nevertheless, those methods are mainly valid for "unique designs", “product design at large” of medium to high value goods or machineries, developed in “non competitive environments”. The nowadays highly stressed competitive environments are pulling down (sometimes drastically) the targeted or attended budgets and also shorten the requested and contractual delivery times. To face these new drastic "detail design" challenges, a new original "heuristic" based on ”generalized safety ratios” is here proposed. It allows a systematic, rational and fast design procedure. Initiated on the customer specification by specific components selection criteria, it generates methodologically "variation designs" through a combinatory design scheme of the different selected machine elements leading to a synthetic “Designer Design Dashboard” fed by different sets of useful technical, economical and availability KPI’s avoiding in such a way the Designer to fail finding effective solutions to this more and more challenging “Machine Design Problem” technically, economically and timely constrained. This new "heuristic" avoids also wastage of the materials in Design and allows the valorisation of "non running" (less) standard components. A typical industrial case study of a Machine Sub-Assembly will illustrate the Methodology followed here.