SUMMARY

Facing conflicting requirements in a world of dynamic, seemingly unquenchable demands on limited resources coupled with the need for advanced, multifunctional material systems, integrated product, materials, and design process design is crucial in a fierce global marketplace. Observing today’s trends of outsourcing “commodity work” from highly industrialized nations to emerging nations, the focus of this research is on the conceptual and early embodiment stages of design, where determining and evaluating principal solutions as well as framing and detailing the subsequent design and realization processes are the essential tasks of designers or system engineers. Thus, the main contribution of the proposed research will be the development of a systematic approach to the simulation-based integrated design of products, advanced multifunctional materials, and multiscale design processes from a systems perspective. It is to be shown that a systematic approach to integrated product, materials and design process design in the conceptual and early embodiment design stages may increase flexibility and allow for systematic design of material concepts and design processes. At the same time, the multidisciplinary character of materials design, its specific complexities and inherent uncertainties are to be accounted for through robust decision support. The proposed systematic approach is to be validated based on two problems in different domains: 1) the design of containment systems for exothermally reactive materials, as well as 2) the design of waveguides for optoelectronic communication systems.