A Modular Design Method Of Adaptability-oriented Product Family

With the development of global industrialization,traditional design methods can no longer meet the needs of diverse customers.In this context,the modular design method has attracted wide attention from manufacturing companies,and it played a key role in the rapid and efficient development of serialized products.It is also important for configuration design and variant design of product.Modular design not only saves time,avoids wasting source of human beings and financial resources,but also meets the needs of diverse customers.This paper proposed a new modular design method of adaptability-oriented product family combined with modern design theory and method.The main research contents are as follows:(1)The modular design of product and design structure matrix were introduced in the first part of the thesis.Then,this part mainly compared the study of representative modularity metrics by previous researchers and put forward a new modularity metric.This modularity metric not only applied to boolean and numeric design structure matrices,but also to the case of symmetric and asymmetric matrices,and the coupling degree in the metric considered the coupling relationship between two modules.Finally,an automobile body-in-white was developed to verify the feasibility and practicability of the proposed modularity metrics.(2)The design structure matrix was used as a tool for product modeling,and the description of the relationship between the design parameters of the product components was described from three perspectives: connection relevance,functional relevance,and physical relevance.The complex relationship in product component design parameters was quantified to build a comprehensive design structure matrix for product integration.The FCM algorithm was used to cluster the constructed comprehensive relevance design structure matrix and obtain different clustering schemes.Taking the high degree of cohesion within the module and the low degree of coupling between the modules as the metric,the optimal module division scheme is selected.Finally,this method was applied to the product module division process of the hook group,and the practicality and validity of this method were illustrated.(3)A modular design method of adaptability-oriented product family was proposed.Firstly,this part analyzed the adaptability of product family,divided the public design parameters and individual design parameters of the product family.Secondly,a comprehensive design structure matrix of the product family was built and clusted,and then get different module division schemes.Finally,analytic hierarchy process was combined to evaluate the adaptability of final scheme,and determine the adaptability of the scheme.The proposed method is applied to the planning of electric-hydraulic disc brake product family,which achieved the goal of reducing the coupling of the design and improved the designadaptability of product family.The research results showed that the feasibility and practicability of the adaptable product family modular design method have been verified through case studies.This method can be applied to design of others product families.The results can not only provide technical support for the modification,evolution or upgrading of future product families,but also provide a new research approach to the modular design of mechanical products.