Analysis and evaluation of product design through design aspects using digraph and matrix approach

摘要

Product design evaluation is essential for all manufacturing industries to explore the soundness and effectiveness of the product design. This paper presents a mathematical model for evaluating and analyzing the product design alternatives using graph theory and matrix approach. In this paper, various contributing factors are identified and their relative importance has been considered. A digraph model is constructed to represent the abstract information of the product design which takes into account of all the factors and is much useful for visual analysis. The digraph model is converted into matrix form, which is used for computer processing. An index is obtained from the product design evaluation function, derived from the matrix for all product design alternatives and it shows the effectiveness of the product design. Indices are calculated for all product design alternatives and they are ranked in ascending order and the product design corresponding to the first rank is selected as best one. The proposed methodology is quite versatile from the point of view that it integrates all factors of the product design. An example has been included to illustrate the methodology proposed in this paper.