An integrated method for flexible platform modular architecture design

Product platform modular architecture identification is the most critical process to support the incremental design of derivative instances. In order to solve the inflexibility in a single modular or scalable platform of complex mechatronics products, an integrated product modularisation scheme based on flow analysis, design structure matrix (DSM) and fuzzy clustering is proposed to compose a flexible platform. The definition of flexible platform is explained and internal mappings among functions, components and modules are set up. DSM for a kernel product is constructed by the flow analysis between the leaf components in design bill of material. An improved scaling by minimising a convex function algorithm is developed to transform the DSM to vectors in two-dimensional spaces, and the vectors are clustered using the traditional fuzzy c-means algorithm. Cluster centre components are selected to identify modular types with respective functional features. Thus, the internal relationships between components can be modelled with flow analysis-based DSM in a clear format, and the proposed DSM transformation and clustering algorithm identify the modular architecture for a flexible platform in a lower computational complexity. A numerical example and computational comparisons are also given to illustrate the proposed concept and the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.