Online design reuse tool for the support of the generation, embodiment and detailed design of products

Abstract

Design reuse is becoming a widely accepted strategy to meet the increasingly fierce competition and highly diversified customer needs in product development. In this research, an integrated and systematic framework to computerize the design reuse process was formulated and a prototype online design reuse system was implemented. This system embodies the evolutionary process of design reuse and supports design reuse from the original requirements through the concept and embodiment stage to achieve a final detailed design. The prototype system retrieves products using multi-indices and a stepwise winnowing method. The advanced-search module of the system solves a design problem using two intelligent search methods to retrieve reusable products. Finally, the system can adapt these retrieved products to generate a new design. The design reuse framework is based on related design methodologies such as function taxonomy, product family, etc. Genetic algorithms and case-based reasoning are adopted in this system to achieve an intelligent search. The variant design method is used in detailed design reuse.