An Engineering Design Strategy for Reconfigurable Products That Support Poverty Alleviation

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick K. Lewis ◽  
Christopher A. Mattson ◽  
Vance R. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Poverty Alleviation ◽  
Financial Risk ◽  
Pareto Frontier ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Developing Nations ◽  
High Impact ◽  
Customer Needs ◽  
Overall Design ◽  
Impact Area ◽  
Reconfigurable Product

Reconfigurable products can adapt to new and changing customer needs. One potential, high-impact, area for product reconfiguration is in the design of income-generating products for poverty alleviation. Non-reconfigurable income-generating products such as manual irrigation pumps have helped millions of people sustainably escape poverty. However, millions of other impoverished people are unwilling to invest in these relatively costly products because of the high perceived and actual financial risk involved. As a result, these individuals do not benefit from such technologies. Alternatively, when income-generating products are designed to be reconfigurable, the window of affordability can be expanded to attract more individuals, while simultaneously making the product adaptable to the changing customer needs that accompany an increased income. The method provided in this paper significantly reduces the risks associated with purchasing income-generating products while simultaneously allowing the initial purchase to serve as a foundation for future increases in income. The method presented builds on principles of multiobjective optimization and Pareto optimality, by allowing the product to move from one location on the Pareto frontier to another through the addition of modules and reconfiguration. Elements of product family design are applied as each instantiation of the reconfigurable product is considered in the overall design optimization of the product. The design of a modular irrigation pump for developing nations demonstrates the methodology.

A Methodology to Support Product Family Redesign Using Genetic Algorithm and Commonality Indices

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri J. Thevenot ◽  
Jyotirmaya Nanda ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Genetic Algorithm ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Manufacturing Companies ◽  
Component Level ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Overall Design ◽  
Family Level ◽  
Systematic Methodology ◽  
Commonality Index

Many of today’s manufacturing companies are using platform-based product development to realize families of products with sufficient variety to meet customers’ demands while keeping costs relatively low. The challenge when designing or redesigning a product family is in resolving the tradeoff between product commonality and distinctiveness. Several methodologies have been proposed to redesign existing product families; however, a problem with most of these methods is that they require a considerable amount of information that is not often readily available, and hence their use has been limited. In this research, we propose a methodology to help designers during product family redesign. This methodology is based on the use of a genetic algorithm and commonality indices - metrics to assess the level of commonality within a product family. Unlike most other research in which the redesign of a product family is the result of many human computations, the proposed methodology reduces human intervention and improves accuracy, repeatability, and robustness of the results. Moreover, it is based on data that is relatively easy to acquire. As an example, a family of computer mice is analyzed using the Product Line Commonality Index. Recommendations are given at the product family level (assessment of the overall design of the product family), and at the component level (which components to redesign and how to redesign them). The methodology provides a systematic methodology for product family redesign.

Renewable energy, poverty alleviation and developing nations: Evidence from Senegal

2011 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 23-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Djiby Racine Thiam
Keyword(s):  
Renewable Energy ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Poverty Alleviation ◽  
Life Cycle Cost ◽  
Poverty Reduction ◽  
Developing Nations ◽  
Energy Access ◽  
Grid Connection ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Main Components

The desire to increase energy access remains a strong driving force for poverty alleviation in rural areas of developing countries. The supply of modern energy facilitates the improvement of human living conditions and the productivity of sectors. It also contributes by reducing the time spent, mainly for women and children, in collecting biomass and therefore can provide an opportunity for an increase in the education level of children and for women empowerment. This paper shows how renewable energy facilitates the improvement of the standard of living in a Sahelian developing country of Senegal. Using a life-cycle-cost approach while integrating an assessment of the environmental externalities, I argue that in remote rural areas where grid-connection is non-existent, photovoltaic (PV) renewable technologies provide suitable solutions for delivering energy services although wind technology has been considered as well. In this framework, policies promoting the adoption of clean technologies in developing nations like Sen-egal could be considered as being the main components on the agenda of poverty reduction.

Clustering and Rough Set-Based Knowledge Discovery for Product Family Planning

2007 ◽  
Vol 10-12 ◽  
pp. 45-50
Author(s):  
C.J. Zhou ◽  
Z.H. Lin
Keyword(s):  
Family Planning ◽  
Knowledge Discovery ◽  
Rough Set ◽  
Decision Rules ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Design Elements ◽  
Customer Needs ◽  
Mapping Process

Product family planning has received much attention from both academia and industries. It aims at incorporating customers’ needs into design elements of product family. The main challenger for product family planning originates from difficulties in mapping customer needs to product family specifications. This paper intends to develop a method to improve the mapping process by reusing knowledge from purchased products according to the satisfied customer needs. A knowledge discovery model for product family planning is proposed, where clustering is adopted to partition the purchased products so that commonality of product family could be effectively addressed and rough set is employed to extract the more concise decision rules. A case study of air condition is reported to illustrate the feasibility of proposed approach and associated algorithms.

Investigation of Customer Needs Frequency vs. Weight in Product Platform Planning

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravindra M. Kurtadikar ◽  
Robert B. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Design Stage ◽  
Product Portfolio ◽  
Customer Needs ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Conceptual Design Stage ◽  
High Level ◽  
Future Work

Customer satisfaction is key for survival and success in today’s consumer market. It is crucial that the customer be used to differentiate between different variants of a product, also known as a company’s product portfolio. Numerous examples in industry prove the benefit of a platform strategy in product development. The aim is to capture a wider market share by launching a number of products based on a common platform and to reduce design and development cost by reducing design cycle time. In this paper we explore the possibility of using high level customer needs alone to define the product’s base platform and differentiating modules. The basic idea is to outline platform and differentiating modules during conceptual design stage of product development and thus plan a product family before we consider any architecture. Planning platforms in conceptual design stage reduces additional costs associated with designing, manufacturing and managing resources for each variant separately. We use design tools such as the functional basis and functional modeling in our approach. In this work we seek to validate the technique by first applying it to existing products and comparing the results against known product platforms. In this paper we outline platform and differentiating modules for a bike and shop vacuum. Future work will focus on applying this approach for more products and finally to new products during conceptual design stage.

scholarly journals Recognition of Human Face Emotions Detection Using Computer Vision Based Smart Images

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1700-1704
Keyword(s):  
Computer Vision ◽  
Skin Color ◽  
High Impact ◽  
Human Face ◽  
Automated Identification ◽  
Desktop Application ◽  
Human Face Detection ◽  
The Face ◽  
Impact Area ◽  
Face Detector

Humans share a collection of basic and essential emotions that are expressed by facial expressions that seem to be consistent. The automated identification of humanemotion in imageswill be possible due to an algorithm that detects, extracts, and evaluates these facial expressions.The Face detector and recognizer application is a desktop application used to recognize human face emotions by using a computer vision based smart images. It consists of human face detection picture boxes and considers an image as an original image. It climaxes a face skin color, finds high impact area and identifies different emotions of the face from an image. The results of the image are depending upon the separation of Eyes & Lips movement of person. This is done by comparingface embedding vectors. It finds the smart photos focused on computer vision for successful identification of facial emotions in terms of various modes of speech such as smiling, shocking and weeping.

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