An Intelligent Method of Product Scheme Design Based on Product Gene

Abstract

Nowadays, in order to have some featured products, many customers tend to buy customized products instead of buying common ones in supermarket. The manufacturing enterprises, with the purpose of improving their competitiveness, are focusing on providing customized products with high quality and low cost as well. At present, how to produce customized products rapidly and cheaply has been the key challenge to manufacturing enterprises. In this paper, an intelligent modeling approach applied to supporting the modeling of customized products is proposed, which may improve the efficiency during the product design process. Specifically, the product gene (PG) method, which is an analogy of biological evolution in engineering area, is employed to model products in a new way. Based on product gene, we focus on the intelligent modeling method to generate product schemes rapidly and automatically. The process of our research includes three steps: ( 1 ) develop a product gene model for customized products; ( 2 ) find the obtainment and storage method for product gene; and ( 3 ) propose a specific genetic algorithm used for calculating the solution of customized product and generating new product schemes. Finally, a case study is applied to test the usefulness of our study.