Optimal Design of Reconfigurable Products Considering Product Configurations and Reconfiguration Processes
Date
2018-08-23
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Abstract
A reconfigurable product is used as several products for delivering different functions through reconfiguration processes to change between product configurations during its utilization stage. Despite the research efforts devoted to design and manufacture of reconfigurable products, influences of reconfiguration processes have not been considered in the design of reconfigurable products. Since different designs can lead to different reconfiguration processes, and both the product configurations and reconfiguration processes influence the evaluation measures of the product, an optimal reconfigurable product design method is developed in this research considering both product configurations and reconfiguration processes.First, a generic design AND-OR tree is used to model design candidates and design parameters based on the same requirements, and generic process AND-OR graphs are employed to model reconfiguration process candidates and process parameters. Specific design and reconfiguration process candidates are created from the generic design AND-OR tree and the generic process AND-OR graphs through tree/graph based search. Based on evaluations to different design candidates and reconfiguration process candidates, the optimal design solution is identified using a multi-level and multi-objective optimization method. The optimization is conducted at two different levels: the candidate optimization to achieve the optimal design/process candidates, and parameter optimization to identify the optimal design/process parameter values.
Second, the efficiency of the developed optimization method is improved when the numbers of design/process candidates are large. A heuristic is developed to evaluate nodes of the design/process tree/graphs considering the importance of these nodes to the optimal design, and some nodes that are unlikely to achieve the optimal solution are pruned from the tree/graphs. To further improve the optimization efficiency, a heuristic function is developed to rank the created design solutions to identify the top-ranked solutions for detailed optimization. Third, a new extended analytic network process (EANP) method is developed to determine weights of the design/process nodes for improving the quality of the developed optimization method considering dependency relations among descriptions of design/process candidates and evaluation criteria. In addition, by selecting the evaluation criteria in the EANP method with the similar evaluation measures in the optimization process, better top-ranked solutions can be identified for detailed optimization.
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Keywords
Reconfigurable product, design configuration, reconfiguration processes, Optimization, analytic network process (ANP)
Citation
Gadalla, M. (2018). Optimal Design of Reconfigurable Products Considering Product Configurations and Reconfiguration Processes (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/32840