Production Processes Modeling for Identifying Technology Substitution Opportunities

This paper describes the first outcomes of a joined research project between Politecnico di Milano and Whirlpool Europe aimed at establishing a systematic industrial approach to anticipate technological demands and solutions to manufacture future household appliances, by taking into account emergence, performances and drawbacks of manufacturing technologies. This work adds new elements of analysis to the forecasting approach proposed by the authors in previous publications and updates its metric for classifying Evaluation Parameters with a detailed set of criteria to characterize the outcomes, the drawbacks and the main resources consumption of a generic industrial process. Such set allows a preliminary extraction of information from technical experts, with no specific TRIZ know- how, in order to ease the process of identifying the main barriers (in TRIZ terms, contradictions) limiting the development of current technologies and/or their substitution with new industrial processes. The original content of the paper is clarified by means of a case study related to an application of the methodology concerning the foaming process of domestic refrigerators.