The development of the Industry 4.0 paradigm and the advancement of information technology have aroused new consumer requirements for smart products that are capable of context awareness and autonomous control. Nature holds huge potential for inspiring innovative design concepts that can meet the ever-growing need for smart products since biology perceive and interact with their living environment for survival. However, to date, very few studies have explored the application of natural wisdom in building innovative design concepts for smart products. This paper proposes a function-oriented design approach for smart products, by analogizing to biological prototypes. To do so, a unified functional representation, based on the Function–behavior–structure (FBS) ontology, is proposed to abstract biological prototypes, followed by a fuzzy triangular numbers-based algorithm designed to locate appropriate biological prototypes as analogical sources for smart product development. Moreover, functional innovative strategies and a hybrid design process are formulated to develop design concepts of smart products, by integrating several existing engineering design methods. Finally, an illustrative design case of a smart natural resource collecting system is used to demonstrate the workability of the proposed method.

工业4.0范式的发展和信息技术的进步，对具有情境感知和自主控制能力的智能产品提出了新的消费需求。大自然具有激发创新设计概念的巨大潜力，可以满足对智能产品不断增长的需求，因为生物感知并与他们的生存环境相互作用以求生存。然而，迄今为止，很少有研究探索自然智慧在构建智能产品创新设计理念中的应用。本文通过类比生物原型，提出了一种面向功能的智能产品设计方法。为此，提出了基于功能-行为-结构（FBS）本体的统一功能表示来抽象生物原型，其次是基于模糊三角数的算法，旨在定位合适的生物原型作为智能产品开发的类比来源。此外，通过整合现有的几种工程设计方法，制定了功能创新策略和混合设计过程，以开发智能产品的设计概念。最后，使用智能自然资源收集系统的说明性设计案例来证明所提出方法的可行性。