Modularization Method for Adaptable Products

Adaptable products are gaining interests. Those products are able to adapt themselves to new environments, new states or new user defined tasks. There is not yet a standard design methodology for designing those products. This paper focuses on making large complex products (e.g. printers) more adaptable. Large-scale complex systems need to have modular architecture to some extent in order for engineers to be able to clearly comprehend the product. Therefore, a method to cluster components of an adaptable system is developed based on Design Structure Matrix (DSM) which stores information about connections between components. For each scenario or action plan to perform adaptability, the importance of component interconnections is rated in a separate DSM structure. By combining the original DSM with the adaptability DSM the engineers can group components. Finally, an example of a coffee maker is illustrated.