THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF FUNCTIONAL MODELING: PRELIMINARY EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES

Abstract

A model of how a product should function to satisfy customers is an essential element in clarifying, identifying, and establishing product architectures. Such functional models greatly enhance the generation of creative form solutions to a chosen architecture. A wider breadth of solutions is generally possible, implementing new and stable technologies. In turn, using the recent concepts of design repositories, the possibilities exist to archive, retrieve, compute, reconfigure, and reason with the product forms. To realize these benefits to the fullest extent possible, functional modeling needs further theoretical development. A formalism of function classes, vocabulary, topologies, and metho..