Research On Product Configuration Design Oriented To Room Air Conditioners

With the aggravating competition in the market, mass customization (MC) has become an effective way for some enterprise to win it. Product configuration design (PCD) is used as the key technology for product fast customization in MC. For the fast customization of air conditioners, the theory and key technologies of PCD were studied. A main process and relevant technologies for PCD of air conditioners were put forward in the paper, which aimed to satisfy customer mostly within the production ability and condition of the enterprise. The configuration design of air conditioners was realized accurately and quickly through these ways above.Firstly, based on the study of the theory and key technologies of PCD, the main process of air conditioners configuration design was divided into two steps: product configuration modeling and fast configuration design oriented to the customer's requirements.Secondly, in order to acquire the product configuration module (PCM) of air conditioners, the methods of configuration modeling were researched in detail. Based on the function-behave-structure mapping principle, the PCM of air conditioners was established by dividing the functional modules of the product family and modular designing of the individual parts. The logic structure and the data relationship of module were also expressed.Thirdly, technologies of product fast configuration design oriented to customer's requirements were studied. Customer's demand was expressed accurately and adequately by using requirement template built in advance. There are three methods used to transform the customer's requirements into the requirements of configuration design: directly transformation, formula transformation and calculation transformation. With different requirement, both case-based reasoning and rule-based reasoning were used in the process of grade configuration design. An effective method of fuzzy comprehensive evaluation was proposed to evaluate configuration solutions in order to obtain the customer's most favorite one.Finally, this paper presented a prototyping software system of the air conditioners' configuration design according to the theory and key technology of PCD. This software system realized computer-aided PCD of air conditioners.