Product redesign using TRIZ and contradictive information from the taguchi method

Abstract

In industry, products often need to be redesigned, after they on the market for some time, to adapt to new market trends. Compared with designing a new product from scratch, product redesign can reduce design cycle time and resources. The concept of product redesign is not extraordinary, but many prior studies only focus on particular products. A generic redesign method is still needed. To deal with the general majority of products, we present a comprehensive redesign methodology using TRIZ and the Taguchi method. Product redesign often requires tackling problems related to improving the functions of a product. Introducing or adding new functions might cause some indistinct contradictions between the new and existing functions of the product. Often, such contradictions might not be found until the final design stage is reached. With the proposed approach, the Taguchi method is used to find contradictions in the early design stage. Taguchi parameters are replaced by product components. In the past, designers eliminated function interactions by eliminating interactive parameters or changing the levels of interactive parameters. With the proposed approach, after finding interactive components, rather than removing the interactive components, TRIZ is used to eliminate the contradictions by keeping and improving the existing functions of the interactive components. After eliminating all contradictions, a conceptual design solution is created for the new product. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.