Modularization for the complex product considering the design change requirements

Driven by the evolving customer requirements and the advancement of key technologies, design changes broadly exist in the lifecycle of the complex product. And as a popular engineering management strategy, the modularization strategy has been widely applied in the research and development process of complex products. However, most of the existing modularization methods do not consider the issue of design change management. Under this circumstance, the “avalanche effect” of the design change propagation might be magnified due to the inappropriate modular structure. Thus, to decrease the effect of the design change propagation, a novel modularization method of the complex product is proposed incorporating the modularity and the scope of design change propagation (SDCP). Firstly, considering the functional and physical relationship between components, the correlation matrix that is the adjacency matrix of the related weighted and directed network model is constructed. Secondly, the indexes of modularity and SDCP are defined based on the predetermined network model and correlation matrix, respectively. Thirdly, taking the modularity and the SDCP as the optimization objectives, a bi-objective optimization model is built for the modularization of the complex product, and then the model is solved by the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II). Finally, the modularization of the cab for a specific electronic sanitation vehicle is implemented as the case study to expound the utility and effectiveness of the proposed methodology.