Evaluation of General Product Adaptability for Adaptable Product Design

Abstract Adaptable products are designed for easy change of their configurations and parameters during the operation stage to satisfy the new functional requirements. In the past, significant progress has been achieved in our research on modeling, evaluation, and optimization for adaptable product design. Prediction of specific product adaptation requirements, however, is a challenging task for the design of adaptable products. The objective of this research is to extend our previous work to the evaluation of general product adaptability when specific product adaptation requirements are not given at the design stage, based on our new adaptable product modeling scheme. In this work, various influencing factors in the new modeling scheme, including adaptable and unadaptable components/sub-assemblies, components/sub-assemblies in modules, and uncertainties of components/sub-assemblies in product adaptation, are considered to improve the existing methods for evaluation of the general product adaptability. The developed new evaluation measure has been employed in the development of a new adaptable product design approach, considering cases without or with specific requirements for product adaptations. Case studies have also been implemented for the design of an adaptable device, considering cases without or with specific product adaptation requirements.