Internet-based Framework to Support Integration of Customer in the Design of Customizable Products

Abstract

A necessary element to design and produce customer-centric products is the integration of customers in the design process. Challenges faced during customer integration into the design process include generating models of the customized product, performing analysis of these to determine feasibility, and optimizing to increase the performance. These tasks have to be performed relatively quickly, if not in real time, to provide feedback to the customer. The focus of this article is to present a framework that utilizes CAD, finite element analysis (FEA), and optimization to integrate the customer into the design process via the Internet for delivering user customized products. The design analysis, evaluation, and optimization need to be automated and enhanced to enable operation over the Internet. A product family CAD/FEA template has been developed to perform analysis, along with a general formulation to optimize the customized product. The CAD/FEA template generalizes the geometry building and analysis of each configuration developed using a product platform approach. The proposed setup is demonstrated through the use of a bicycle frame family. In this study, the focus is on the application of optimization and FEA to facilitate the design of customer-centric products.