International Conference on Advanced Design Research and Education 2014 16 18 July 2014

ICADRE14 Singapore


Human-Computer Interaction for Part Selection in
Product Design

Naoaki Saeki
a*
and Panos Y. Papalambros
b



a
Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering,
Nagoya University, Japan

b
Optimal Design Laboratory,

Department of

Mechanical Engineering,
University of Michigan, U.S.A.

*
Corresponding Authors Email: saeki.naoaki@f.mbox.nagoya-u.ac.jp
1. Introduction
Modular design reduces manufacturing costs while tailoring products to customers and has been
used extensively in factory automation and software development (Onishi, 2000). In a particular form
of modularity, a product is decomposed into parts that have a specific functionality using functional
decomposition (see, e.g., Otto and Wood 2001). Designers select parts with the appropriate
functionality from an available set to meet specific design requirements (Saed, 1999). For cost
reduction, the problem becomes selecting the parts that satisfy the functional requirements and
minimize total cost. Minimizing cost is a deceptive objective; instead, the preferred objective should
be maximizing profit, since higher product cost may achieve higher demand and thus overall gain for
the producer (Michalek, Feinberg, and Papalambros, 2005). For simplicity, a minimum cost objective
may be adequate, as assumed in the present study.
Creating the "dimensions" for each function in a functional decomposition (namely, generating
alternative ways to perform the function) has been studied in conceptual design and creativity
methods, such as morphological analysis (Levin, 2012). Given a set of parts with associated functions,
part selection for building the overall system is a combinatorial problem. For example, the
requirement of conveying a material can be achieved by a robot manipulator, belt conveyor,
automatic cart, slope, etc., using combinations of parts as shown in Fig. 1. Part selection has been
addressed in design research (see, e.g., Saed, 1999, Zhang, Wang, Sheng, and Liu, 2013). A practical
difficulty in design choices during product development is the presence of biases and heuristics
(Tversky, 1974) and the large number of choices (Farrington, 2011).
In this paper, we examine how humans may interact with a computer to explore good (least cost)
module combinations. The computer stores product data and parts usage from previous applications,
and the functional decomposition for the given task. The least cost combination of parts that meets the
functionality requirements is estimated and provided to the designer. The designer can explore the
combination further or modify the problem to generate new alternatives, for example, by collecting
more data. In a sense, the machine selects preferred points in the design space of the traditional
morphological analysis process. Indeed, the motivation for this work comes in part from experiences
with student work in design courses. The paper discusses formulating the part selection problem,
estimating least cost combinations of parts using available data, and collecting data when none
available. We also present some early simulation studies.

2. Problem formulation
We formulate the part selection problem using a Boolean function (Chikalov, 2013). For example,
for three available parts (x1, x2, x3), we use a binary vector x = {x1, x2, x3}
T
to describe part usage, i.e.,
xi = 1 if the ith part is used, otherwise xi = 0. We use a cost vector c = {c1, c2, c3}
T
to calculate the total
cost, e.g., when only parts x1 and x3 are used, the binary vector beomes x = {1, 0, 1}
T
and the total cost
c
T
x = c1+c3. The functional requirement is described by f(x). When the requirement is fulfilled, f(x) =
Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Design Research and Education (ICADRE14)
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International Conference on Advanced Design Research and Education 2014 16 18 July 2014
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1, and x is called a feasible design, otherwise f(x) = 0 and x is an infeasible design. Table 1 shows the
relationship between x and is referred to as a truth table. The table shows f(x) = 1 when x1 = 1 or x2
= 1 x3 = 1, and it is represented by the Boolean function f(x) = x1+x2x3. Here, + means or,
means and. The representation is composed of a sum of product terms. Each product term is called a
feature. Features in this example are x1 and x2x3. The least cost part selection is found from the truth
table. In a real study, the information from previous applications will be incomplete and the truth table
will have some blanks, as shown in Table 2. In this situation, the Boolean function must be estimated
using the data available in the truth table which we call a Partially-Defined Truth Table (PDTT).


Figure 1: Example of part selection problem

Table 1: Example of full truth table Table 2: Example of partially-defined truth table
x1 x2 x3 f(x)
0 0 0 0
0 0 1 0
0 1 0 0
0 1 1 1
1 0 0 1
1 0 1 1
1 1 0 1
1 1 1 1

x1 x2 x3 f(x)
0 0 0 0
0 0 1 -
0 1 0 0
0 1 1 -
1 0 0 1
1 0 1 -
1 1 0 1
1 1 1 -


Table 3: Definition of the variables
n number of parts xn set of infeasible designs
m number of collected data mlimit upper limitaton of data collection
Sk k-th decision node writen by feature xun set of unclassified designs
xu set of possible combinations {0, 1}
n
xi element of xu
xp set of feasible designs xj element of xu
xf subset of xu classified into infeasible
node by Sk
Dp(xi) Hamming distance to the nearest
feasible design from xi
xt subset of xu classified into feasible
node by Sk
Dn(xi) Hamming distance to the nearest
infeasible design from xi

3. Boolean function estimation
This section discusses the Boolean function estimation using PDTT. We propose a classifier
Algorithm 1 in Table 3 and Fig. 2 based on a decision tree (Pagallo, 1989, Safavian, 1991). The
difference from a basic decision tree is that the decision nodes are defined specifically for part
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selection. Specifically, the classifier builds a decision tree whose decision nodes are written by
features. The classifier works as follows: f(xi) values for blank truth table entries are estimated using
Dp(xi) and Dn(xi); each decision node is defined to include as many feasible designs as possible; the
decision nodes are created until feasible and infeasible designs are completely divided. For instance,
the classifier for the Boolean function shown in Section 2 is described as shown in Fig. 3. More
details on the algorithms are available in
http://ode.engin.umich.edu/publications/PapalambrosPapers/2014/328long.pdf.
To evaluate performance in simulations, the Boolean function is estimated from the PDTT. Data
from PDTT are randomly collected allowing duplication. The quality of the estimation method is
evaluated by an error rate which is the ratio of incorrectly estimated f(x) and total number of f(x).


Figure 2: Definition of variables and flow chart diagram for Algorithm 1


Figure 3: Decision tree with feature decision node representation f(x) =x1+x2x3


(a) Boolean function f1(x) (b) Boolean function f2(x)
Figure 4: Relationship between error rate and number of data collections

This evaluation is conducted using two different Boolean functions; x = {x1, x2, x3, x4, x5}
T
, f1(x) =
x1x2+x3x4x5 and x = {x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x6, x7, x8, x9, x10}
T
, f2(x) = x1x2+x3x4x5+x6x7x8. For
comparison, we use SVM (Support Vector Machine) (Cortes, 1995) and k-NN (k-Nearest Neighbor)
(Larose, 2005) for estimation. The results in Fig. 4 reveal that the proposed method is the most
accurate because the proposed classifier represents the Boolean function better than the other methods.

4. Data collection
In this section we look at part selection from a different viewpoint. We assume there are no
available data. Designers have to collect data by themselves. Usually designers have limited resources
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for data collection. Thus, we seek to find the least cost combination with a limited number of data
collections.
We assume all f(x) in PDTT are unknown. We can know any f(x) by data collection but the number
of data collections is limited. Algorithm 2 shown in Fig. 5 describes the strategy for this problem. The
proposed method estimates the cheapest combination of parts using the current PDTT and collecting
the data one by one.
We evaluate the performance of Algorithm 2 by simulating two cases. The cost vector and the
constraint function for Case 1 are c1 = {3, 6, 4, 7, 5}
T
and f1(x), respectively and c2 = {3, 6, 4, 7, 5, 3,
6, 4, 7, 5}
T
and f2(x) are for Case 2. The least cost of feasible design in the PDTT after data collection
is regarded as the best combination. The results in Fig. 6 show that the proposed strategy works better
than random data collection. Specifically, Algorithm 2 with the proposed classifier or k-NN work well.

Figure 5: Flow chart diagram for Algorithm 2

(a) Case 1 (b) Case 2
Figure 6: Relationship between best cost and the number of data collections

5. Conclusion
We formulated the part selection problem using Boolean functions and proposed a classifier based
on the decision tree concept to identify the least cost combination with limited data. When there are
no available data, we proposed a strategy for efficient data collection. We examined the performance
of these approaches in simulation studies. The next step is to conduct experiments with human
designers and study how this approach may help reduce bias and improve design solution generation.

Acknowledgement:
This research was partially supported by a Japan-US Advanced Collaborative Education Program
(JUACEP). This support is gratefully acknowledged. The authors also wish to thank Dr. Yi Ren and
the other members of the Optimal Design Laboratory at the University of Michigan for fruitful
discussions.


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