The objective of this paper is to create a framework for sustainable product systems while considering the economic and environmental aspects of products. Specifically, this paper addresses the development of a Factor X model to study the diffusion of eco-innovation strategies. An adaptive agent based simulation model is presented to deduce the artifact system level design principles (behaviors) for sustainable product development.
KEYWORDS: Product engineering, Fluctuations and noise, Control systems, Curium, Interference (communication), Intelligence systems, Design for manufacturability, Manufacturing, Digital signal processing, Signal processing
This paper presents a modified Taguchi methodology to improve the robustness of modular product families against changes in customer requirements. The general research questions posed in this paper are: (1) How to effectively design a product family (PF) that is robust enough to accommodate future customer requirements. (2) How far into the future should designers look to design a robust product family? An example of a simplified vacuum product family is used to illustrate our methodology. In the example, customer requirements are selected as signal factors; future changes of customer requirements are selected as noise factors; an index called quality characteristic (QC) is set to evaluate the product vacuum family; and the module instance matrix (M) is selected as control factor. Initially a relation between the objective function (QC) and the control factor (M) is established, and then the feasible M space is systemically explored using a simplex method to determine the optimum M and the corresponding QC values. Next, various noise levels at different time points are introduced into the system. For each noise level, the optimal values of M and QC are computed and plotted on a QC-chart. The tunable time period of the control factor (the module matrix, M) is computed using the QC-chart. The tunable time period represents the maximum time for which a given control factor can be used to satisfy current and future customer needs. Finally, a robustness index is used to break up the tunable time period into suitable time periods that designers should consider while designing product families.
The paper attempts to lay a foundation to understand and address the system level issues of sustainable product development. It is often emphasized that creating products on the basis of function/need and redefining product systems are the most important aspects of sustainable product development; however, no systematic approaches exist to adequately address these issues. We hypothesize that it is the epigenetic effect of artifact (interactions with other artifacts, environment, etc.) that produces a web structure among artifacts. This web structure (known as artifact system (AS)) has its own laws and rules of evolution. Appropriate design and realization of AS (i.e., constructive intervention of AS’s laws) will significantly promote sustainable product development. Specifically this paper addresses two issues: (1) The development of AS and discussion about how it is related to sustainable product development, and (2) A simulation model to study the distribution of artifact in AS and its implications on sustainable product development. The simulation methodology is elaborated through an example to emphasize the importance of AS framework to study sustainable product development. Finally, our preliminary results of simulation indicate that in every AS only few artifacts are dominant. This result points out that controlling the behavior of these dominant artifacts should be the prime focus of the sustainable product development efforts.
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