Design for product adaptability

Abstract

Adaptable design is a new design paradigm to create designs and products that can be easily changed to satisfy different requirements. Adaptable design aims at identifying the designs and products considering functionality, manufacturing efforts, customization, and environment friendliness. This research focuses on adaptable design considering product adaptability. In this work, product adaptability is evaluated by three measures including extendibility of functions, upgradeability of modules, and customizability of components. Various design candidates created in adaptable design are evaluated by different life-cycle evaluation measures including product adaptability of design, part and assembly costs of manufacturing, and operationability of customers. Since different evaluation measures are modeled in different units, the grey relational analysis method is employed to integrate these measures for prioritizing different design candidates. A case study is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced adaptable design approach. © 2008 Sage Publications.