Identifying Core Parts in Complex Mechanical Product for Change Management and Sustainable Design

Changes in customer needs are unavoidable during the design process of complex mechanical products, and may bring severely negative impacts on product design, such as extra costs and delays. One of the effective ways to prevent and reduce these negative impacts is to evaluate and manage the core parts of the product. Therefore, in this paper, a modified Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidential approach is proposed for identifying the core parts. Firstly, an undirected weighted network model is constructed to systematically describe the product structure. Secondly, a modified D-S evidential approach is proposed to systematically and scientifically evaluate the core parts, which takes into account the degree of the nodes, the weights of the nodes, the positions of the nodes, and the global information of the network. Finally, the evaluation of the core parts of a wind turbine is carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the paper. The results show that the modified D-S evidential approach achieves better performance regarding the evaluation of core parts than the node degree centrality measure, node betweenness centrality measure, and node closeness centrality measure.