抄録
Increasing the efficiency of resources is a major approach within the framework of sustainability in manufacturing. Long-life design of a product is one of the promising approaches for improving resource efficiency of the lifecycle of the product. Design methodology for upgradability enables products to be used for longer than conventional products tend to be abandoned because of functional obsoleteness before the end of physical life. One of the difficulties of upgrade design resides within prediction of future trend such as technological trends and market trends, and upgradable products should be robust against such uncertainties in the future. In order to deal with such uncertainties of future technological trends, in our previous research, we proposed a method to make upgrade plans of a product which specify the lineup of candidate components for the upgrade at each generation. In other words, the upgrade plans include information when a product is upgraded and which components are replaced with up-to-date ones. And then, the plan should be implemented by designing the product structure and geometry. However, designing the geometric model of an upgradable product which can adapt to the upgrade plan is one of the unsolved issues. For supporting this design stage, in this paper, we propose a computer-aided design method for geometric models of upgradable products. Our design method assumes that geometric constraints are included in the original product model. Based on the information, our method supports designers to reconstruct the product model to adapt to the upgrade plan and to satisfy the geometric constraints. This paper also demonstrates the availability of the method with a design example of an upgradable cellular phone.
