Symbiotic Design of Products and Manufacturing Systems Using Biological Analysis

Changes in manufacturing systems are oftenly driven by product design variations that exist at specific points in time, and gradual product design changes that appear over time. Further interactions take place to fully utilize established manufacturing system capabilities when considering product future designs. This is common in eco-systems when two or more different species co-evolve simultaneously, and it has inspired the development of a new model to capture the symbiotic relationship between products and their manufacturing systems based on Cladistics which is commonly used in biology. The obtained hierarchal order was analyzed in depth to track the product changes record and guide the next design steps to benefit from system capabilities.