Product-bpas, a software tool for designing innovative and modular products for agriculture and crafts

Abstract

Farming equipment plays a very important role in the performance of farmers in African countries. Particularly in Senegal, the design of tools is generally done in a traditional way. Very often these tools suffer from reliability problems, modularity to facilitate their maintenance. Ergonomic problems are also encountered to adapt farming tools to the size, the age, and the morphology of users. In this paper, we propose a methodology for general approach for designing modular products. This methodology is then implemented in Product-BPAS, a software aimed to help designers and to evaluate the behavioral performance of products in the preliminary phases.