Product modular design incorporating life cycle issues - Group Genetic Algorithm (GGA) based method

Traditional design methods lead to serious environmental problems because of the oversight of life cycle issues such as recycling. For solving these problems, a new modular design method is proposed with the considerations of not only the traditional function related attributes, but also the life cycle related ones. These attributes form what we call Modular Driving Forces (MDFs). The proposed method first determines what MDFs should be included and what their weights should be. Then the component to component relations with each specific MDF are generated and expressed in a matrix. After that, the comprehensive relations between components with different MDFs are established with the introduction of a comprehensive relation matrix for further modular optimization. Each element in the comprehensive matrix denotes the relation of every two components affected by all the MDFs. Finally, Group Genetic Algorithm (GGA) is employed to conduct modular optimization. The modular object adaptive function constructed for GGA optimization is to maximize the interactions between components within modules. The proposed method is explained by a case study of a refrigerator. Sensitivity analysis shows that the proposed method is robust.