Design by cataloguing – a product-driven design approach for the conceptual design of fusion remote maintenance systems

• The impacts of Engineering Changes (ECs) in the engineering design process on the development of RM systems for EU-DEMO are perceived through input requirements and plant design uncertainties. • A novel product-driven design method, “Design by Cataloguing”, is constructed based on the review and foundations of contemporary design practices, Forward Engineering (FE), Reverse Engineering (RE) and Design Catalogue (DC). • The methodology employs the simultaneous use of FE and RE, synergistically bridged by ECs functioning as a feedback loop. The contrast in abstraction level between FE and RE is utilised to mitigate the impact of ECs. • DC is heavily used in the starting point of RE to facilitate the search and documentation of Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions by exploiting parametric and capability information to reconstruct 3D CAD models and facilitate the concept variant analysis. • Technical risks, redesign strategies or possible plant modifications under ECs are the main outcomes of the design methodology. The design of remote maintenance systems for the Eurofusion demonstration power plant project demands a bottom-up approach, in which equipment is defined with appropriate maturity and space reservations to inform the architecture and for subsequent design development. Conventional product development and systems engineering processes, known as requirement-driven design, start with analysing and evaluating higher-level requirements to abstract product information, functions, and design constraints to support subsequent design stages, such as solution finding and concept generation. However, several limitations can be observed when input requirements are unstable, inadequate, or subject to numerous engineering changes in the plant design, imposing risks to informed decisions related to the project development. This paper introduces a novel product-driven design approach using catalogues to overcome these challenges. Our contribution has been based on the fundamentals of forward and reverse engineering. The proposed method is demonstrated through the ongoing development activities for the DEMO Tokamak In-BioShield remote maintenance equipment conceptualisation. The preliminary results showed improvements in the analysis and synthesis of complex systems’ design by systematically reviewing a wide range of available Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions while performing functional analysis and evaluating each solution's technology maturity.