Abstract
Due to recent globalization in industries and manufacturing, many industrial products have been used in the way which had been hard to imagine in advance in the design process of the products. It has reported that such usage had frequently resulted in troubles such as blocking of appearance of the products' functions and appearance of undesirable functional phenomena. Therefore, it is desired to develop a method for obviating such troubles in advance in the product design phase by predicting such use and phenomena caused by the use. This requires modeling of the relationship between functions of products and the ways in which the products are used, and then developing a method for predicting functional phenomena caused by a specific usage. Functions of products are abstract concepts generated through subjective interpretation of products' behaviors by users. Therefore, the ways of using products affect functions indirectly via the behaviors. Hence, it is necessary to build models of functions, behaviors and a set of physical events which occur depending on each way of usage, and also to integrate the models. In this paper, this modeling and integration is discussed.
