Storing and Retrieving Design Solution in the Physical Domain Based on DFX Tools and Morphological Analysis

Abstract

Today the design of a new product has become a very challenging process, due to the growing number of aspects that a product needs to deal with during his life cycle. Like: regulations from authorities, expectations from costumers, company's capabilities and more. To cope with this growing complexity, the field of design theories and methodologies is full of tools and methodologies that were developed to structure the design process. Axiomatic design is one those design methods that was built in the perspective of setting a rational framework where the design process must go through. The general idea of axiomatic design is to divide the design process into four domains: costumer, functional, physical and process domains. In this framework the designer needs to structure his design by mapping between those domains while in the same time respecting two fundamental axioms. (a) The independence axiom, (b) the information axiom. The zigzagging process for the transition between functional and physical domains starts by defining the functional requirement, from which the design parameters are driven and end up by selecting the physical solution. In this work a methodology for storing and retrieving physical solution for a given design parameters is proposed. The physical solutions are stored based on their level of attainment in regard to a number of predefined criteria. Most of those criteria can be derived from Design for X tools. Then using morphological analysis method, suitable physical solution is retrieved in regard to the level of attainment that we can reach in the predefined criteria. For illustrative purpose a program was designed to reflect the benefit of this method. This program was developed using Python programming language and his graphical user interface Tkinter.