Increasing competition in the global marketplace demands products be adaptable to the changes of functional requirements, operation environments, and technology advancement. Adaptable design can be employed for developing adaptable products and systems that can be changed, such as reconfigured and upgraded, during product operation stage. In addition, since product and operating parameters are normally subject to influence of uncertainties that lead to variations of functional performance, robust design needs to be carried out to identify the design whose functional performance is the least sensitive to the variations of product and operating parameters. This research aims at developing a robust adaptable design approach such that the product is adaptable to various changes in requirements and parameters during the product operation stage, meanwhile the product functional performance measures are the least sensitive to parameter variations. First, the requirements, parameters, and variations of these parameters are defined as numerical functions of a time parameter. Then, mathematical models are established to describe the relationships among product design/operating parameters, functional performances, and variations of these parameters and performances. Furthermore, an optimization-based model is developed to achieve the robust adaptable design. A case study has also been developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the newly developed robust adaptable design method.
