Evaluating behavioral process similarity of mechanical products in redesign for functional adaptability

Functional adaptability makes a product not only multifunctional but also compact in structure and flexible in application. An adaptable-function mechanical product generally demonstrates various degrees of similarity in its behavioral processes for different adaptable functions. Evaluation of this similarity is an important aspect of research for the design of such products, especially for redesigning existing products towards functional adaptability. Until present there lacks research on the design and development of this specific kind of products, including the work on the similarity evaluation of their behavioral processes. To address this problem, this paper investigates the functional and structural characteristics of adaptable-function products first. Based on this, by applying the function-behavior-structure design rationale, a redesign framework of mechanical product for functional adaptability was proposed, and the similarity characteristic of behavioral process was investigated, both on that of the behavior structure and that of behavior characteristics. Furthermore, the paper applied a fuzzy mathematics method for the evaluation of behavioral process similarity, for which a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model was constructed and the corresponding evaluation method was proposed. Finally, a mini-combined machine tool with adaptable-functions was taken as an example to analyze the behavioral processes and to illustrate the proposed similarity evaluation procedure. The results demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methodologies.