Opel, KIT, IKA and Fraunhofer LBF introduced The Extended Target Weighing Approach at ALLIANCE’s first GA last month. The approach is a holistic, cross-component, function-based lightweight design method in the context of Product Generation Engineering (PGE).
It supports the identification and evaluation of lightweight design potentials, in early phases of product development.
Systematically, it takes mass, costs and CO2-emissions into account, with respect to technical uncertainties.
The approach is based on Value Engineering & Target Costing and abstracts their basic principles for lightweight design.
The core of the method is the so called “Function-Effort-Matrix”. It assigns the estimated percentage contribution of one subsystem of the product to the fulfilment of the functions of the considered system.
Based on that, mass, costs and CO2-emissions per function can be determined and search fields for lightweight design potentials can be derived. In these identified search fields, new lightweight design concepts are generated and evaluated.
