COMPUTER-AIDED GENERATION OF MODULARIZED CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS WITH ASSEMBLY AND VARIETY CONSIDERATIONS
Open Access
- Author:
- Gupta, Saraj
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- None
- Committee Members:
- Gul Kremer, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
- Keywords:
- Modularity
Conceptual Design
Design for Assembly
Design for Variety
Computer-aided Design
Functional Basis of Design
Design Repository - Abstract:
- Design is the foremost step in the development of any electro-mechanical product, and conceptual design stage is the most ambiguous and creative phase of design. Only few computational tools exist at this design stage, and mostly designers rely on personal experience or experience of co-workers to generate quality designs. Accommodating manufacturing and assembly considerations during the design phase is found to be imperative to prevent frequent problems from occurring during the production stage. In recent years, modularity has received a tremendous interest as a product design strategy, but very few modularization methodologies are found to focus on the conceptual design stage. Product variety management has gained primary importance in this era of mass customization as manufacturing firms see variety issues as the key to profitability. The proposed research framework aims at generating computerized conceptual product designs by incorporating Modularity, Design for Assembly (DFA) and Design for Variety (DFV) principles at the conceptual design stage. Conceptual design alternatives from the proposed framework are ranked based on minimum assembly time and are composed of modules in a way that future changes in customer needs are satisfied only by replacing certain modules. The framework involves searching a design repository of components by using functional-basis and pre-defined graph grammar rules, to generate all possible conceptual design alternatives. These are ranked and filtered using a DFA index, and top two alternatives are selected. Selected designs are modularized and filtered using a DFV index to obtain the best design alternative. The proposed framework is demonstrated through the design of two electro-mechanical products.