Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Various customer requirements and design feasibilities have to be effectively tested and evaluated in the early stage of product development to obtain the best chance for the product to eventually meet customer satisfaction. This requires deep knowledge and extensive information on the product design, manufacturing and application. Existing methods of product testing and evaluation lack the capability to cope with the current trend of user expectations for products that are characterized by complexity, connectivity, and diversity. User interactions and product models are not fully integrated in product development and application environments. This proposal will develop a virtual test platform for product evaluation and improvement. The research efforts will focus on key technologies of a virtual product test platform with the following goals: 1) development of intelligent methods using machine learning to reduce dependence of experience for decision-making during product evaluation and improvement; 2) development of a gesture-based interactive method to enable the involvement of product users in product development; and 3) implementation of the virtual test platform and evaluation of its performance by using industrial and consumer products. The proposed research will advance the field of product development by introducing processes that are capable of understanding the intent of product users. This will lead to a self-evolution product design system. This research will make a significant step towards automatic design using machine learning methods to summarize design knowledge and automatically form design rules to guide product development that is independent of human experience. This is a new direction in product development driven by the ever-growing need for product innovation. The proposed research will develop tools for industry and product users to test and explore various product solutions in a controllable computer environment that can provide feasible and tangible solutions for product development. It will also be essential for the next generation of manufacturing systems, which adopts the Internet of Things, Digital Manufacturing capabilities, 3D printing and Big Data analytics in product development.