Abstract
Key design characteristics (KDCs) are important information related to the product and part designs, which significantly influence on the product’s functions, performances, and quality. Identifying KDCs for a complex product will help designers to focus on key design parameters during the design process and rapidly obtain design schemes based on their close relationships to the product’s functions, performances, and quality. Although there are some researches on key characteristic (KC) identification, most of them are focused on key process characteristics (KPCs) and few on KDCs. There also lacks a KDC identification framework to support KDC identification with better completeness and diverse usages. Adaptive design is the most important pattern of complex product design. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic method to identify KDCs for complex product adaptive design, in which KDCs can be determined by two related phases. Firstly, a product design specification (PDS)-KDC Candidates Network (PKCN) is constructed by using existing product instance data, cluster analysis, KC flow-down, and network analysis approaches. Then, the result from the first phase is used as a basis to identify KDCs for adaptive design. Three KDC identification techniques: similarity reasoning technique, breadth-first search (BFS), and the gray relational analysis approach are applied to find out KDCs from the PKCN, which are the most sensitive to the variation of a PDS. These identified KDCs can help designers to understand the relationships between KDCs and PDS and rapidly develop a design scheme. The effectiveness and the feasibility of the proposed method are verified by a case study via the development of an electric multiple unit (EMU)’s bogie.
Highlights
The manufacturing mode has transferred from mass production to mass customization under the global competition
This paper focuses on the product design applications; hereafter, we use the key design characteristics (KDCs) instead of the general term key characteristic (KC) to describe the product and part design information that significantly influence on product functions, performances, and quality
KDC candidates, this research uses the gray relational analysis approach to further identify these KDCs that are sensitive to product design specification (PDS) changes
Summary
The manufacturing mode has transferred from mass production to mass customization under the global competition. Complex products show complexities in the customer demands, product structures, embedded techniques, etc., which involve in various design characteristics and complex relations among them. This leads to a challenge that the enterprises cannot reuse the existing design knowledge to generate a design scheme and effectively communicate with suppliers to develop a supply plan. This paper presents a systematic method to identify KDCs for complex product adaptive design.
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