OPTIMAL DESIGN AND PROCESS PLANNING FOR PRODUCT ADAPTATION WITH INITIAL EVALUATION OF SOLUTIONS BASED ON INFORMATION ENTROPY

Adaptable products are used to satisfy different and changing customer requirements through changes of products such as reconfiguration and upgrading during their utilization stages. In this research, an optimal design and process planning approach is developed for product adaptation with initial evaluation of solutions based on information entropy. In this approach, various candidates of design configurations and operation processes for adaptation of a product are modelled by an AND-OR tree with design and process nodes. Design and process nodes are further associated with design and process parameters. Optimization to identify the adaptable product design and process is conducted at two levels: configuration/process optimization level and parameter optimization level. Information entropy is employed to evaluate the partial configuration/process candidates modelled as branches in the AND-OR tree to eliminate the branches that are unlikely to lead to the optimal solution for improvement of the optimization efficiency. Numerical example and engineering application are developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the newly introduced approach.