A customer requirement driven framework for design synthesis - applied to a washing machine

In order to maximize the success of a product, the customers’ wishes need to be integrated into the entire product design process. The design of a mechatronic system can be divided in a 3 different phases, requirements engineering, architectural design and detailed design. During the requirement phase, customers needs are translated into engineering characteristics. In the architectural phase, the topology, consisting of the number and type of components, as well as some key properties (size, material) of the different components, is chosen. This phase has a major impact on the final product performance. Since (mechatronic) products need to meet an ever increasing number of performance specifications and constraints, recently computational design synthesis approaches have been developed to support design engineers. These types of methods use computational power and computer models to search the design space in an automatic way. However, as these methods focus entirely on maximizing the functional performance, the customers’ actual wishes and needs may slip to the background. This article presents a novel computational design synthesis approach which integrates design space exploration and Quality Function Deployment during the architectural design phase. The proposed method allows to generate architectures that maximize customer satisfaction. The effectiveness is illustrated by an industrial case study: the design of the mechanical architecture for a washing machine.