An association rule mining and maintaining approach in dynamic database for aiding product-service system conceptual design

摘要

Product-service system (PSS) conceptual design process plays a critical and strategic rule in offering an optimal set of products and services to customers. Parameter translation driven by customer requirements (CRs) is the mainline in this process. A two-phase parameter translating process is presented based on a three-domain PSS conceptual design framework: translating CRs into design requirements (DRs), and then into module characteristics (MCs) of products and services. DRs and MCs of PSS are both divided into product-related part and service-related part. There exist complex relationships between and within the two parts of parameters in one domain and those between parameters in two adjacent domains. This condition increases the complexity and difficulty to translate CRs into DRs and MCs with definite specifications. The traditional parameter translating methods which depend on the designers' experiences are insufficient to fulfill the goal of domain mapping. The wealthy conceptual design cases for existing PSS can be reused to generate sufficient knowledge for designers. An apriori-based association rule mining algorithm is proposed to elicit parameter translating rules for aiding the PSS conceptual design. To ensure the availability of the mined rules, rule redundancy and conflicting solutions are taken into account. Considering the new design data are continuously added in, an incremental updating technique is proposed to maintain the association rules without retracing the original database. A weighting strategy is adopted to highlight the novelty the newly added records, and a competitive strategy is employed to avoid ignoring some promising rules. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed approach for aiding PSS conceptual design.