The market for agricultural machinery is characterized by products with a high degree of maturity in the product life cycle. Consequently, current improvements in new machinery are predominantly incremental and new projects basically use solutions that are already consolidated. This makes this domain appropriate for benchmarking existing systems and envisioning new value propositions. The present paper deals primarily with the former and uses the value curves as a means to structure the comparison among different families of technical systems; in particular, harvesting machines for shell fruits from the ground surface, e.g., chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts, were investigated here. The process of building value curves requires the identification of currently fulfilled requirements. Despite the attention paid by engineering design research to requirements, a structured process is lacking to extract relevant information and create value curves or other representations useful for benchmarking. The present paper approaches this problem and presents how the authors have individuated relevant knowledge for characterizing different categories of harvesting machines. Namely, after an extensive search of the scientific literature and patents, a critical review of existing machines, aimed at individuating their functioning principles, architecture, and attitude in fulfilling specific design requirements, was performed. Then, existing machines were classified in 8 main categories, and their strengths and weaknesses were identified with reference to 11 competing factors. The consequent construction of value curves enabled the identification of possible points of intervention by hypothesizing possible future evolutions of such machinery, both in a structural and in a value-based perspective. Limitations about the repeatability of the followed approach and possible repercussions on design research are discussed.

中文翻译：

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从提取当前满足的需求到价值曲线：壳类水果收获机领域的案例研究和工程设计的经验教训

农机市场的特点是产品在产品生命周期内的成熟度较高。因此，目前新机器的改进主要是渐进式的，新项目基本上使用已经整合的解决方案。这使得该领域适用于对现有系统进行基准测试和设想新的价值主张。本文主要处理前者，并使用价值曲线作为构建不同技术系统系列之间比较的手段；特别是，这里研究了从地表收获带壳水果的机器，例如栗子、核桃和榛子。构建价值曲线的过程需要识别当前满足的要求。尽管工程设计研究关注需求，但缺乏结构化过程来提取相关信息并创建价值曲线或其他对基准测试有用的表示。本论文解决了这个问题，并介绍了作者如何将相关知识个性化以表征不同类别的收割机。也就是说，在广泛搜索科学文献和专利后，对现有机器进行了严格审查，旨在个性化其功能原理、架构和满足特定设计要求的态度。然后，将现有机器分为 8 个主要类别，并参考 11 个竞争因素确定其优缺点。随后构建的价值曲线能够通过假设此类机制在结构性和基于价值的角度可能的未来演变来识别可能的干预点。讨论了所遵循方法的可重复性的局限性以及对设计研究的可能影响。