An optimised part-selection strategy in product reconfiguration design

Effective reuse of used parts and design experience help keep costs down and maintain a short time-to-market product cycle. Part selection aims to select pre-defined parts which can be connected in certain ways to perform some high-level functionality. Constraints are critical to the part-selection problem and are used to represent the function requirements that are decomposed or derived from design knowledge and particular customer needs. In this paper, constraints in part selection are discussed and classified into two basic types: part local constraints and part reconfiguration constraints. This paper mainly discusses part reconfiguration constraints, which are further classified into two categories: monotonic reconfiguration constraints and complex reconfiguration constraints. The part selection process is comprised of a series of decisions in a real product reconfiguration design process. The order of decisions is believed to have a significant effect on the development of the product reconfiguration design. The concept of effective selection range function was introduced to compute the total effective selection range, and a heuristic algorithm based on it is proposed in this paper, which aims to make the search process convergent with feasible results as well as to retain the maximum total effective part selection range. A case study is given and some conclusions are presented.