Axiomatic Design Application to Product Family Design

Abstract

The basic concepts and the framework of Axiomatic Design (AD) provide powerful tools in the design of products and product families, especially for visualizing the design goals and improving the design process. When learning how to apply AD, however, nearly a half of the uninitiated designers like students may need to devote much effort to advance a sufficient number of different design concepts in terms of functional requirements (FRs) and/or design parameters (DPs), which is often done in abstract phrases like the first step in AD. The instructors must encourage them to think freely and squeeze out all the FRs and DPs they have in their minds and must guide them to integrate FRs functionally and DPs physically to obtain the desired design matrix.