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

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.