Development of Modular Design Method for Inverse Manufacturing

Modular design methods have been studied for ease of, mainly, manufacturing or assembling. However, modular design methods to reduce environmental loads considering whole product life cycles such as reuse or upgrading have hardly been studied enough. This paper proposes a method for determining modular structure of a product by aggregating various parameters related to a whole product life cycle by using SOMs (Self-Organizing Maps). This paper also illustrates prototype system that implements the proposed method and a case study of modular design of a printer. The case study revealed that the proposed method succeeded in modularizing the target product with considering several kinds of parameters including material kinds, lifetimes, and life cycle options