| Along with social progress and economic development, market competition is becoming fiercer and fiercer, which promotes companies to increase market sensitivity and speed up the upgrade of products. Product improvement design is a process, which researchs into the existing shortcomings and proposes programs to address the deficiencies and upgrade the product performance. Product improvement design is an important part of the innovative design field. In reality, the vast majority of innovations are derived from the improvement design. The adoption of advanced design methods and technical tools to guide the improvement design process plays a crucial role for the design of high quality and excellent performance product. Therefore, in the conceptual design phase of product development, in recent years, it becomes a research hotspot to locate the fundamental flaws of existing products quickly and accurately, and propose effective solutions to improve the design. Many scholars have researched the innovative design tools, processes, methods and so on, and formed distinctive product design systems, which have been the foundation of product improvement design.Based on the above background, this paper has done research on the method of product improvement design. In order to avoid detours in the product improvement design process and improve timeliness of design, this paper integrated the methods' characteristics and advantages of Function Analysis (FA), Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), and put forward a new product improvement design method which based on FA/TOC/TRIZ. In this method, understanding the relations between function and structure of the improvement objects was first proposed based on Function Analysis, and then TOC was combined to determine the root cause of the problem, define the improvement direction and clear system conflicts. Improved TRIZ tools were used to analyze the problem and acquire effective innovative solutions.The features of the proposed product improvement design are that it has put forward a concept of creating the product Structure-Function List (S-FL) and System Structure Diagram (SSD) in the problem analysis stage, which provided technical aids for scientific & systematic thinking process and a clear direction of solution. In addition, this paper introduces the Future Reality Tree (FRT) of TOC into the evaluation system of innovative solutions, which ensures that all improvement design solutions are effective, and has great significance to the implementation of projects.The proposed design method in this paper is both systematic and integrity. It has done some researches on the improvement design method according to the three stages of analyzing the problem, identifying the problem and solving the problem, and carried out a detailed planning for each stage. Besides, corresponding design theory and technology tools were used to assist designers for their design work. The proposed model of design process has traits of clear thinking, and easy operation, which is convenient for ordinary designers to make innovate design. In this paper, the improvement method was used in the improvement design of solar junction box, and innovative solutions were acquired successfully, which illustrated the correctness and feasibility of the theory, and could be a reference for similar product improvement design.
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