Purpose

The development of complex products and systems is a continuously iterative process from customer requirements to a mature design. Design changes derived from multisources occur frequently during the design process. Furthermore, change propagation will impose impacts on design costs and lead times. In view of this, how to predict and control the propagation of multisource design change to reduce the changes impact is an urgent issue in the development of complex product.

Design/methodology/approach

In this paper, a new four-phase routing approach based on weighted and directed complex networks is proposed for multisource design change propagation. Phase I: as the foundation of this research, a product network model is established to quantify describe the complex product. Phase II: the hub nodes are identified based on the LeaderRank algorithm, which can be regarded as multisource nodes of design changes. Phase III: a calculation method for change propagation intensity is proposed, which improves the systematicness and accuracy of the evaluation results. In this paper, change propagation intensity is defined by four assessment factors: importance degree of parts, execution time of design tasks, coupling strength between parts and propagation likelihood. Phase IV: a routing method of multisource design change propagation and ant colony optimization algorithm are proposed in this paper, which can solve the coupling conflicts among change propagation paths and improve the search efficiency by using the parallel search strategy.

Findings

The proposed method and another method are used to search the optimal propagation path of multisource design change of a motorcycle engine; the results indicate that this method designed in this study has a positive effect on reducing the change impact, market response time and product design costs when design change occurs in the products design process.

Originality/value

The authors find a new method (a network-based four-phase routing approach) to search the optimal propagation path of multisource design change in complex products design.

中文翻译：

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基于网络的复杂产品多源设计变更传播四阶段路由方法

目的

复杂产品和系统的开发是一个从客户需求到成熟设计不断迭代的过程。源自多源的设计更改在设计过程中经常发生。此外，变更传播将对设计成本和交付周期产生影响。有鉴于此，如何预测和控制多源设计变更的传播，以减少变更的影响，是复杂产品开发中亟待解决的问题。

设计/方法/方法

在本文中，针对多源设计变更传播，提出了一种基于加权和有向复杂网络的新四阶段路由方法。第一阶段：作为本研究的基础，建立产品网络模型，对复杂产品进行量化描述。第二阶段：基于LeaderRank算法识别枢纽节点，可视为设计变更的多源节点。第三阶段：提出了变化传播强度的计算方法，提高了评价结果的系统性和准确性。在本文中，变化传播强度由四个评估因素定义：零件的重要性程度、设计任务的执行时间、零件之间的耦合强度和传播可能性。第四阶段：

发现

将提出的方法和另一种方法用于搜索摩托车发动机多源设计变更的最优传播路径；结果表明，本研究设计的这种方法在产品设计过程中发生设计变更时，对降低变更影响、市场响应时间和产品设计成本具有积极作用。

原创性/价值

作者找到了一种新方法（基于网络的四阶段路由方法）来搜索复杂产品设计中多源设计变更的最佳传播路径。