Design automation of vertical centrifugal pumps

The increasing competition in business raises the necessity to adopt innovative strategies to support the product development process. Specifically, environments adopting Engineer-to-order manufacturing involves a high flow of information between customers and vendors, suggesting the seeking of new methodologies in order to generate faster responses. This thesis discusses an approach for automating the design process by means of Rule-based design (RBD), exploring part and assembly standardization issues along with their potential impact on reducing lead times and overcoming design bottlenecks. A case study referring to vertical centrifugal pumps is conducted. It permits to understand the transformation of collected knowledge into a code for automatic design, recognizing the input parameters and projecting the benefits. Finally, the investigation concludes by presenting the results of the adopted approach and the prospects in future challenges of the automation of the product development process.