This document introduces a synthesis map of approaches, processes, methods and tools for multidisciplinary product development. The presented map is associated with an open-access article – see the citation box below – and differs from the one provided in the article in that it is searchable, which makes it easier to pinpoint the approaches, processes, methods and tools. This document comprises a legend and the map.
To contextualize the map, multidisciplinary products arise from the integration of contributions from mechanical, electrical, electronics, software, and broadly information and communication technologies. This “multidisciplinarity” implies a higher technical and organizational complexity that can invite companies to adapt their development. To support companies in the adaptation of their development and navigate the dense and fragmented scientific literature corpus on multidisciplinary product development, the authors proposed to graphically organize it.
In a first phase, multidisciplinary product development was investigated by analyzing three specific types of multidisciplinary products that can be referred to as “cyber-physical systems”, “mechatronics”, and “smart products and systems” in the literature. This first phase led to three maps which graphically organized a total of 236 “concepts and techniques” identified from 167 scientific papers through an extensive literature review and categorized based on a four-level model paired with a decision tree. A second phase, which result is represented below, introduced some simplifications and filters to the initial maps, which narrow down the number of concepts and techniques to 56. The following map represents a preliminary database of concepts and techniques for multidisciplinary product development and serves to support companies in their transformation from the product development perspective by providing them with a synthesized overview of the related literature. This work is particularly suited for companies and researchers looking for getting acquainted with the scientific literature related to multidisciplinary product development and how the different concepts and techniques can be associated.