An effective similarity determination model for case-based reasoning in support of low-carbon product design

Shedong Ren,Yanwei Zhao,Fangzhi Gui,Wanliang Wang,Min Zhan

doi:10.1177/1687814020970313

Shedong Ren, Yanwei Zhao + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1687814020970313

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Abstract

In the initial stage of low-carbon product design, design information is always uncertain and incomplete, as well as the coupling properties between design attributes, thus it requires retrospective coordination for design conflicts resulting from the inclusion of low-carbon requirements. Reusing the prior design knowledge can promote design efficiency, however, the acquisition of similar cases knowledge not only needs to consider the similarity of design problems, but also the adaptability of candidate cases. This study presents an effective similarity determination model to support low-carbon product design, and targets of the proposed model are (1) to reasonably determine design ranges of attribute values for product cases retrieval by representing the uncertain design attributes with fuzzy set theory; (2) to construct an efficient indexing structure to generate the index set of similar cases based on the improved discretized highest similarity method by proposing two effective strategies; and, (3) to establish similarity estimation models for different types of attributes, and it calculates the information content of each attribute to evaluate the adaptability of cases based on the Information Axiom. The applicability of the proposed model is demonstrated through a case study of similar cases retrieval for the vacuum pump low-carbon design.

Highlights

In the 21st century, human society confronts with significant challenges from climate change
As the coupling properties between the quality characteristics, it inevitably causes the design conflicting problems when incorporating the low-carbon indicators, which needs to go through multiple backtracking design processes to coordinate the contradictions
We propose an effective similarity determination method to obtain acceptable cases knowledge for reuse, similarity here is referred to the similarity between the attribute values of the query case and that of the candidate case, but the similarity of the system range of the candidate case and the design range of the query case

Summary

Introduction

In the 21st century, human society confronts with significant challenges from climate change. Advances in Mechanical Engineering carbon product design takes account of the environmental indicators during product planning and conceptual design stages, and puts forward the strategies and ideas for the generation of new design schemes with the purpose of carbon emission reduction, and it has attracted a heated research in both academia and industry.[4,5,6]

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