关键词:
modularisation
flexible product platform
flow analysis
DSM clustering
hydraulic support
摘要:
Product platform modular architecture identification is the most critical process to support the incremental design of derivative instances. In order to solve the inflexibility in a single modular or scalable platform of complex mechatronics products, an integrated product modularisation scheme based on flow analysis, design structure matrix (DSM) and fuzzy clustering is proposed to compose a flexible platform. The definition of flexible platform is explained and internal mappings among functions, components and modules are set up. DSM for a kernel product is constructed by the flow analysis between the leaf components in design bill of material. An improved scaling by minimising a convex function algorithm is developed to transform the DSM to vectors in two-dimensional spaces, and the vectors are clustered using the traditional fuzzy c-means algorithm. Cluster centre components are selected to identify modular types with respective functional features. Thus, the internal relationships between components can be modelled with flow analysis-based DSM in a clear format, and the proposed DSM transformation and clustering algorithm identify the modular architecture for a flexible platform in a lower computational complexity. A numerical example and computational comparisons are also given to illustrate the proposed concept and the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.