Local Redesign Based On Existing Equipments For Unexpected Disaster

A terrible and unexpected natural disaster, such as earthquake, tsunami, flood and blizzard, would cause huge damage to life and property of human. Because there would be many disaster relief requirements (for machinery) that go beyond the disaster prevention plans made in advance, we call the disaster unexpected (or unconventional) disaster in our research. To cope with the unexpected disaster, some equipments or apparatuses, called emergent equipments, are urgently needed and should be provided within a couple of days (one or two weeks). Therefore, the problem how to provide (including design, manufacturing and delivery) the emergent equipments for disaster relief as quickly as possible becomes a very important issue. However, most of the research mainly focuses on emergency management and decision-making, the emergency design method for the disaster relief equipments remains unexplored.Supported by National Natural Science Fundation of China, this dissertation studies the local redesign method based on existing equipments for unexpected disaster, called emergency design for short. For a class of unexpected disaster, our research intends to study the rapid response design strategies, patterns, and methods, and then provides corresponding coupling analysis methods and conflict resolution methods needed for dealing with it. We hope this research will contribute to providing mechanical equipment for disaster relief in time, and mimizing the disaster losses as far as possible. The main contents of this dissertation are as follows:(1) A design solution of local redesign based on existing equipments for unexpected disaster is proposed. First of all,5 emergency requirements (ER5) of unexpected disaster were extracted according to a class of unexpected disasters had happened, such as icing and snow disaster. According to ER5, we made use of the existing equipments available in unexpected disaster to generate a preliminary design scheme, in which a (or several) new functional component(s), called vice module, was(were) integrated or added on a main equipment (called main-module A) to satisfy the emergency machinery requirements. The existing equipments could be seen as the "function-structure integrated" components, and the extraordinary rapid response design scheme was realized by the combination of existing equipments. However, in most of the cases, design conflicts would take place in the combination, because the existing equipments are always heterogeneous, which may come from different product families and do not have general interfaces. Therefore, the coupling analysis and conflict resolution for it had to be carried out to achieve a feasible design scheme. (2) The coupling analysis method is given for the local redesign of the main module and the vice one. A novel comprehensive dependency matrix (CDM) that can demonstrate the direct and indirect dependency relationship simultaneously was proposed for the description and analysis of design coupling. The change propagation analysis of the combination design was also conducted, which was integrated in the construction progress of CDM. The result of coupling analysis based on CDM would help the engineers to get the inside of the dependency between the design functions and variables, especially to recognize the "interface" functions and variables. The analysis result would benefit the design conflict resolution.(3) A dual-systems cooperative coevolutionary algorithm with human computer cooperation (DCCEA-HC) is developed to allow the solution of design parameter conflicts and optimization in complex engineering system. Firstly, we proposed a Dual-systems Variable-Grain Cooperative CoEvolutionary Algorithm (DVGCCEA). Then, we integrated human computer cooperation mechanism on DVGCCEA, in which artificial solutions were encoded and added in algorithm population according to some certain rules. The proposed method is called DVGCCEA-HC. The experimental applications on a satellite layout design and a MDO test problem illustrated that in the comparison to DVGCCEA, DVGCCEA-HC achieved better solutions and higher success ratio.(4) An example of emergency design for a de-icing and snow removal vehicle (ISRV) is given to illustrate how to implement the local redesign based on existing equipments according to the proposed emergency design process model. The effectiveness and feasibility of the local redesign method based on existing equipments targeted at unexpected disaster were verified.It is expected that our research of the local redesign based on existing equipments would provide methodology support to emergency design, and benefit the research and its progress of design methodology targeted at unexpected disaster.