A CO-EVOLUTION MODEL FOR MULTI-DOMAIN ASSOCIATION IN PRODUCT ENGINEERING

摘要

The back and forth changes in customer requirements, technology, manufacturing capabilities and product design are the main source of change dynamics in engineering design and manufacturing systems. These reciprocal changes are analogous to biological co-evolution, which occurs in nature. This paper presents a new method to study the co-evolution across multiple engineering domains using 'Cladistics', a hierarchical classification tool, to illustrate evolution hypothesis of related species, and results in a tree graph called 'Cladogram'. The new method obtains a co-evolution hypothesis after one cladistics analysis step that combines all studied market segments, plans, manufacturing systems, products, etc. in one general cladogram. The method is expandable to many engineering domains, and is used to capture knowledge from these domains then reuse it to synthesize new entities such as new products, new manufacturing systems, or new market segments.