An extended analytic network process method for optimal design of reconfigurable products considering dependency relations among descriptions of design/process candidates and evaluation criteria

Abstract

A reconfigurable product serves as multiple products to deliver different functions through reconfiguration processes to change between product configurations. An optimization method was developed in our previous research to identify both the optimal design and the optimal reconfiguration processes. Because the generic design or process considering different candidates was modeled by an AND–OR tree or graph, importance weights were assigned to nodes with an AND or OR relation, such that the less-important nodes were pruned to improve the optimization efficiency. In this research, an extended analytic network process method is introduced to further improve the quality of the optimal reconfigurable product design approach when dependency relations among descriptions of design/process candidates and evaluation criteria are considered. In this method, the initial weights of the design/process nodes in the AND–OR tree or graph are adjusted based on the dependency relations such that the weights which truly reflect their contributions to the solutions are achieved. In addition, multiple evaluation criteria similar to the evaluation measures used in optimization are selected to identify the weights of the design/process nodes. A case study has been implemented to demonstrate effectiveness of the extended analytic network process for improving the quality of optimal reconfigurable product design.