Nature Inspired Co-evolution in the Manufacturing World of Artefacts

摘要

The symbiotic changes among different species in nature can be also noticed in the co-development behaviour between products and their manufacturing systems in the artificial world. Based on this analogy, a co-evolution model has been proposed to study the dependency of products and manufacturing systems evolution paths. This paper incorporates Cladistics - a biological classification tool - and reconciles the resulting cladograms (classification trees) in the developed co-evolution model. The development of machine-tools is presented as a case study for demonstration. The results prove the model propositions and illustrate the co-development of product design and manufacturing technology.