Product complexity analysis including DfA principles

Abstract

Engineering design is a sequence of complex actions intended to develop an effective product structure. The designed product should be adapted to both the customer’s requirements and the requirements related to its life cycle. In the context of these requirements, many individualised approaches of design for X have been developed, where X defines different requirements. One of the most important approaches in this  field is design for assembly. There are many views of this designing methodology specified in literature, majority of which is aimed at analysis and increase of effectiveness of joining the integral parts of the designed product. The article proposes a new approach to the analysis of the designed product complexity, taking into account the principles of design for assembly. It is based on the analysis of construction nodes, de fined as pairs of parts in terms of the possibility of adapting them to an easy, cheap and fast assembly process. In this context, a dependency matrix of the product structure was developed and the rules assigning specific principles of “design for assembly” to the relevant construction nodes. On the example of a gas burner, the practical application of complexity analysis is presented and the bene fits of its application are discussed.

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