ASSEMBLY AND VARIETY CONSIDERATIONS DURING CONCEPTUAL DESIGN

Foremost step in the development of any electromechanical product is its design, and conceptual design is the most ambiguous and creative phase of design. There exist only a few computational tools that aid designers at conceptual design stage, and mostly designers rely on personal experience or experience of co-workers to generate quality designs. The proposed framework aims at generating robust computerized conceptual designs by incorporating Modularity, Design for Assembly (DFA) and Design for Variety (DFV) principles at the conceptual stage. Conceptual design alternatives obtained from the proposed framework are ranked based on minimum assembly time, and are composed of modules in a way that future changes in customer needs are satisfied only by replacing certain modules. The framework involves searching a design repository of components by using functional-basis and pre-defined graph grammar rules, to generate all possible conceptual design alternatives. These design alternatives are ranked and filtered using a DFA index, and top two alternatives are selected. Selected designs are modularized and filtered using a DFV index to obtain the best design alternative. This paper provides a detailed discussion of the proposed framework, and its working is illustrated through the design of a mounting system for holding a Variable Message Sign (VMS).