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In this work, we show that bioinspired function-sharing can be effectively leveraged in engineering design by abstracting and emulating the product architecture of biological systems that exhibit function-sharing. Systems that leverage function-sharing enable multiple functions to be performed by a single structure. Billions of years of evolution have led to the development of function-sharing adaptations in biological systems. Currently, engineers leverage biological function-sharing by imitating serendipitously encountered biological structures. As a result, utilizing bioinspired function-sharing remains limited to some specific engineering problems. To overcome this limitation, we propose the reduced function-means tree as a tool to simultaneously abstract both biological adaptations and their associated product architecture. The tool uses information from an existing bioinspired design abstraction tool and an existing product architecture representation tool. A demonstration study illustrates the tool's ability to abstract the product architectural interactions of function-sharing biological systems. The abstracted product architectural interactions are then shown to facilitate problem-driven bioinspiration of function-sharing. The availability of a problem-driven approach may reduce the need to imitate biological structures to leverage biological function-sharing in engineering design. This work is a step forward in analyzing biological product architectures to inspire engineering design. The future work will focus on validating the proposed tool by performing user studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inclusive products intend to equally serve people with and without a disability. This paper focuses on creating guidelines that are applicable during the early stages of designing inclusive products. Actionfunction diagrams are used to formally compare existing inclusive products to their typical counterparts to study the design similarities and differences in the context of accessibility. A data mining technique, association rule learning, generates rules through comparison of inclusive and typical product data. In prior work, generation of function-based association rules for inclusive design has been performed on a smaller scale using this method; this research seeks to extend and formalize the same method, by studying a larger set of inclusive products. Trends in the generation of rules are analyzed indicating that a finite set of rules should be applicable to an arbitrarily large set of products. Further, the rules are analyzed in detail to evaluate their potential for transferability and reuse from one product to another. Of particular interest is the transferability of the rules across apparently disparate product domains such as garden tools and residential furniture. The conceptual and physical similarity of the rules is discussed in the context of creating inclusive product families based on a platform of inclusive elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conceptual design for assembly (DFA) method is introduced in this paper. The method incorporates DFA analysis into the conceptual design phase. Current DFA methods, essentially all of which are post-design DFA analyses, are reviewed with emphasis on the popular Boothroyd and Dewhurst method. The product architecture-based conceptual DFA method developed and presented in this article uses two relatively new concepts: the functional basis and the method of module heuristics. The functional basis is used to derive a functional model of a product in a standard language and the module heuristics are applied to the functional model to identify a modular product architecture. The embodiment or form definition phase then attempts to solve each module with one part (or as few as possible). The critical advantage of the conceptual DFA method is that it does not require a physical prototype or completed design geometry, thus reducing the number of design iterations before seeing DFA benefits. One case study compares the conceptual DFA method with the Boothroyd and Dewhurst DFA method and shows their equivalence in part count reduction. A second case study examines the evolution of products over the years. This study reveals the evolution of products into designs with smaller part counts, closely matching the modules identified by the conceptual DFA method. This lends credence to the method proposed in this paper as a useful tool for reducing the design cycle time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article presents and illustrates a functional modeling-based representation of digital twinning (DT) architectures. We provide a detailed review of the existing architectures and frameworks intended for use on product digital twins. We identified gaps in the prior work on architectures and frameworks for DT of products, product families, and systems. We identified a need for robust representation schemes that enable product-specific synthesis and analysis of DTs, which the existing DT architecture representations do not offer. We integrated the efforts of the researchers on DT architectures in our functional modeling-based architecture representation approach. We included selected attributes of each reviewed framework and addressed the identified gaps through our functional modeling-based DT architecture representation. The proposed architecture representation approach opens up new avenues of research and can potentially help improve the design process for product DT. This paper illustrates our approach through an instructional example of a COVID-19 testing breathalyzer kiosk designed as a rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work deduces principles of bioinspired product architecture to effectively leverage biological function-sharing in engineering design. Function-sharing enables a single structure to perform multiple functions and can improve the performance characteristics of a system. The process of evolution via natural selection has led to the emergence of function-sharing adaptations in biological systems. However, the current practice of bioinspired function-sharing is largely limited to the solution-driven imitation of biological structures. This work aims to overcome such limitations by performing a function-based analysis of biological product architectures. First, a phylogenetic approach is used to select generalized case studies from the animal kingdom. Next, the product architectures of the selected case studies are then modeled using function modeling and analyzed by clustering the identified functions into modules. A function-based categorization of the sampled biological modules reveals the presence of four types of modules in the biological case studies. Analyzing the function-sharing scenarios associated with each type of biological module enables us to deduce four guidelines for bioinspired development and arrangement of function-sharing modules. Finally, a demonstration study applies the guidelines to the design of an inlet-outlet port for a washer-dryer system. The deduced guidelines can enable engineers to identify function-sharing scenarios in the early stages of product design and reduce the need to imitate biological structures for function-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Product family design offers a cost-effective solution for providing a variety of products to meet the needs of diverse markets. At the beginning of product family design, designers must decide what can be shared among the product variants in a family. Optimal design formulations have been developed by researchers to find one optimal component sharing solution based on commonality, cost or technical performance of a product family. However, these optimization methods may not be able to apply in consumer product design because some metrics (e.g., visual appeal and ergonomics) of a consumer product cannot be formulized. In this paper, we suggest a tradeoff between commonality and the quality of the modular architecture in product family platform selection. We introduce a method for designers to identify multiple component sharing options that lie along a Pareto front of maximum commonality and strategic modularity. The component sharing options along the Pareto front can be evaluated, compared, and further modified. We demonstrate the method using a case study of product family platform selection of high-end and low-end impact drivers and electric drills. In the case study, the quality of the modular architecture is evaluated using a design structure matrix (DSM) for each of product variants. Three architectures along the Pareto front with maximum commonality, optimal modularity, and a balanced solution of the two metrics are highlighted and further examined to validate the effectiveness of our method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Companies that generate a variety of products and services are creating, and increasing research on, mass-customized products in order to satisfy customers’ specific needs. Currently, the majority of effort is focused on consumers who are without disabilities. The research presented here is motivated by the need to provide a basis of product design methods for users with some disability—often called universal design (UD). Product family design is a way to achieve cost-effective mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products serving distinct market segments to be developed from a common platform. By extending concepts from product family design and mass customization to universal design, we propose a method for developing and evaluating a universal product family within uncertain market environments. We will model design strategies for a universal product family as a market economy where product family platform configurations are generated through market segments based on a product platform and customers’ preferences. A coalitional game is employed to evaluate which design strategies provide more benefit when included in the platform based on the marginal profit contribution of each strategy. To demonstrate an implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of light-duty trucks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dealing with component interactions and dependencies remains a core and fundamental aspect of engineering, where conflicts and constraints are solved on an almost daily basis. Failure to consider these interactions and dependencies can lead to costly overruns, failure to meet requirements, and lengthy redesigns. Thus, the management and monitoring of these dependencies remains a crucial activity in engineering projects and is becoming ever more challenging with the increase in the number of components, component interactions, and component dependencies, in both a structural and a functional sense. For these reasons, tools and methods to support the identification and monitoring of component interactions and dependencies continues to be an active area of research. In particular, design structure matrices (DSMs) have been extensively applied to identify and visualize product and organizational architectures across a number of engineering disciplines. However, the process of generating these DSMs has primarily used surveys, structured interviews, and/or meetings with engineers. As a consequence, there is a high cost associated with engineers' time alongside the requirement to continually update the DSM structure as a product develops. It follows that the proposition of this paper is to investigate whether an automated and continuously evolving DSM can be generated by monitoring the changes in the digital models that represent the product. This includes models that are generated from computer-aided design, finite element analysis, and computational fluid dynamics systems. The paper shows that a DSM generated from the changes in the product models corroborates with the product architecture as defined by the engineers and results from previous DSM studies. In addition, further levels of product architecture dependency were also identified. A particular affordance of automatically generating DSMs is the ability to continually generate DSMs throughout the project. This paper demonstrates the opportunity for project managers to monitor emerging product dependencies alongside changes in modes of working between the engineers. The application of this technique could be used to support existing product life cycle change management solutions, cross-company product development, and small to medium enterprises who do not have a product life cycle management solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New styles can be created by modifying existing ones. In order to formalize style change using grammars, style has to be formally defined in the design language of a grammar. Previous studies in the use of grammars for style change do not give explicit rationale for transformation. How would designers decide which rules to modify in a grammar to generate necessary changes in style(s) of designs? This paper addresses the aforementioned issues by presenting a framework for strategic style change using goal-driven grammar transformations. The framework employs a style description scheme constructed by describing the aesthetic qualities of grammar elements using adjectival descriptors. We present techniques for the formal definition of style in the designs generated by grammars. The utility of the grammar transformation framework and the style description scheme is tested with an example of mobile phone design. Analyses reveal that constraining rules in grammars is a valid technique for generating designs with a dominance of desired adjectival descriptors, thus aiding in strategic style change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When developing a product, designers must decide what consumer variation will be addressed and how they will address it, because each consumer has a unique set of human factors, preferences, personal knowledge, and solution constraints. Numerous design methodologies exist to support the design of a product or set of products that address this consumer variation. However, currently there is little work supporting the selection of a design methodology, resulting in an ad hoc or a priori decision before conceptual design begins. This paper presents an affordance-based design method for use prior to conceptual design to help designers understand the consumer variation that is present. This facilitates the creation of a product or set of products that meets the demands of both the consumer(s) and the organization that is developing the product. Once consumer variation is understood, conceptual design can be performed with a more complete understanding of the overall problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on creating guidelines for the design of products for persons with disabilities that are applicable during early stages of design. The research uses the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) to formally describe user activity, the Functional Basis to describe product function, and the actionfunction diagram as a framework to create a detailed understanding of the interaction between a user and a product. The main objective of this paper is to explore the transferability of the knowledge contained in the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to universal product design. The design information contained in the ADA guidelines is abstracted using a function based approach; association rules are mined from this design information. The association rules obtained are statistically significant guidelines for universal design (UD). The existing examples of universal design are compared to their typical version to observe the design elements that improve the accessibility of a product. Association rules are also mined from the existing examples of universal design using the same methodology. Further, the applicability of ADA guidelines to universal product design is investigated based on the commonality between the association rules obtained from both the datasets. The results show that rules can be translated to a product having a degree of similarity based on the size and space relationship between the user and product without direct translation from an ADA based design guideline to a product design guideline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universal design is a concept intended to promote the development of products and environments equally usable by all the users, benefits of which are well established. Earlier efforts to provide guidelines for universal design have not adequately supported industry requisites. This paper focuses on creating early stage applicable design guidelines for universal design which is based on modeling framework that builds on and extends general function based product design methods and formal human activity classification as developed by World Health Organization. This paper explores the applicability of data mining techniques, particularly, association rule learning, for developing guidelines for universal design. The results show promise in the application of data mining techniques to efficiently extract rules for improving universal design. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Product platforms, product families, and modular design are an evolving research area. Many of the theories and concepts proposed serve as powerful tools to industry in reducing the number of specialized components in products, reducing assembly time and accelerating the conceptual and embodiment design stages. In this paper, a structured approach to the modular design of electro-mechanical consumer products is proposed based on a study of the module structure of products. The approach is based on developing product family design templates. These templates are based on prior product design knowledge and the flow and conversion of energy through a product. The templates also carry potential embodiment solution information. Design templates for two product classes, electricity to thermal energy and electricity to rotational energy , have been developed and can be used by designers to undertake design or re-design efforts on products. A group of 16 consumer products from two product families has been used in this study. A clarifying design example is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]