Towards Multistage Design of Modular Systems
This addresses the design of complex modular systems for engineers, but it appears incremental as it extends existing combinatorial synthesis methods to multistage contexts.
The paper tackles the problem of designing modular systems over multiple stages by defining time/logical points, designing modules for each, and selecting solutions based on quality and compatibility, with numerical examples provided.
The paper describes multistage design of composite (modular) systems (i.e., design of a system trajectory). This design process consists of the following: (i) definition of a set of time/logical points; (ii) modular design of the system for each time/logical point (e.g., on the basis of combinatorial synthesis as hierarchical morphological design or multiple choice problem) to obtain several system solutions; (iii) selection of the system solution for each time/logical point while taking into account their quality and the quality of compatibility between neighbor selected system solutions (here, combinatorial synthesis is used as well). Mainly, the examined time/logical points are based on a time chain. In addition, two complicated cases are considered: (a) the examined logical points are based on a tree-like structure, (b) the examined logical points are based on a digraph. Numerical examples illustrate the approach.