Proceedings of ICAD2011 The Sixth International Conference on Axiomatic Design

The business solution to the three-sided conflict among industry, customers and the environment is based upon transitioning from the selling of products to the selling of services, while the manufacturer remains the owner of the product and is responsible for it throughout its lifecycle. A key to the success of such a transition is the concept of extended maintenance based upon modular product design. With the aid of axiomatic design, the product's concept can already be optimized at the preliminary design stage. Furthermore, axiomatic design leads to a substantial decrease in the product's concept complexity, that is, in the core of modular design. A system that automatically modularizes a product design can be realized by integrating principles of axiomatic design with two new design structure matrices (DSM). The goal of the proposed methodology is to automatically determine the number of modules and to identify product modules in a design, which are essential for the implementation of a module-based product-service plan. An example of automatic modularization for the design of a water dispenser is presented