Design for manufacturing in the engineering education 5.0 era: an agile framework for project-based vehicle prototyping

Abstract

In this article, a Design for Manufacturing (DfM)-centered capstone framework is presented for organizing the full Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate (CDIO) cycle of a competition vehicle within a single academic semester. While competition-based capstone studies have reported benefits in experiential learning and subsystem development, they rarely explain how manufacturability constraints, configuration control, cost tracking, and sprint-gated reviews are operationally integrated within a 15-week delivery window. This study, therefore, asks whether an integrated DfM-CDIO-design thinking-project-based learning framework can compress the development of a competition vehicle into a single semester while maintaining control of scope, schedule, and cost. The framework combines DfM, CDIO, design thinking, project-based learning, and the engineering design process through weekly sprints supported by individual logbooks, a live bill of materials, rolling-wave Kanban–Gantt planning, gated reviews, and an early hard-point freeze. The framework was implemented with 26 mechanical engineering undergraduates developing a Shell Eco-marathon prototype. Presented as a descriptive case study of a single course deployment rather than as a controlled evaluation of educational effectiveness, the article documents the operational structure, project-control artifacts, and observed delivery outcomes of the implementation in its institutional context. The team delivered a competition-ready vehicle within one semester with a budget variance below 5%. Cost analysis showed that the drivetrain represented 54% of total expenditure, followed by steering (28%) and the frame (18%), highlighting the main leverage point for future cost reduction. Relative to published competition-based capstones, the main contribution is not the vehicle competition itself, but the explicit semester-scale operational scaffold that links manufacturability, configuration control, and agile learning artifacts. These results suggest that, in this specific course setting, a one-term capstone can support full-cycle design-build-test activity when manufacturability constraints are imposed early, weekly evidence is required, and subsystem convergence is managed through gated reviews.