Collaborative Research: Innovations in Product Flexibility

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The primary objective of this collaborative research is to establish fundamental principles and a comprehensive metric and decision-making tool to support the design of flexible products. Product flexibility is defined as the ability of a product to adapt in response to factors such as competitive market pressures, rapid technological change, and transient and multi-dimensional customer requirements. Specifically, this research is focused on investigating the fundamental principles and techniques for enhancing the flexibility of a product for future evolutionary changes, even if the precise form of those changes is not known a priori. Towards this goal, basic research is planned for establishing (1) a comprehensive metric and decision-making tool for objectively evaluating and comparing the flexibility of products, (2) fundamental principles and teachable guidelines for designing flexible product architectures, based in part on empirical studies of flexible products, and (3) a rigorous, stochastic decision analysis method to account for the difficulty of forecasting the value of a flexible product and to identify designs with appropriate levels of flexibility. The research will lead to improved methods for designing innovative, flexible products by (1) more effectively characterizing flexibility, (2) establishing fundamental principles and teachable methods for designing flexible product architectures, and (3) providing a framework for making design decisions involving flexibility in the face of uncertainty. When transferred to industry, this knowledge will help improve the quality and reduce the cost and time to market of products that are more sustainable and responsive to human needs and changing markets. To transfer the research from the laboratory to the classroom, product flexibility teaching modules with hands-on activities and in-depth examples will be created. The teaching modules will be launched in graduate and undergraduate courses at UT-Austin and the United States Air Force Academy. In a graduate course on product design and prototyping, students will apply the research results to design flexible assistive technologies for persons with physical and mental disabilities.