Sustainable design from functional domain to physical domain

The sustainable product design is one of the most effective approaches to achieve cleaner production with special consideration for environmental impacts of products, as the cleaner production is a recent global concern for manufacturing. At the early stage of sustainable design, it is a challenge to understand each individual customer's requirements, and achieve the transformation from these sustainable functional requirements to the design parameters. This paper is devoted to an approach to achieve the mapping from the functional domain to the physical domain, and transforming fuzzy sustainable functional requirements into design parameters, mainly according to the multi-level requirement information description of the products. After the general model of sustainable functional requirements is proposed, the model of fuzzy sustainable functional requirements is discussed in detail. It introduces a computational approach to achieve the mapping from sustainable functional requirements to design parameters during the mapping process from the functional domain to the physical domain. The exoskeleton robot is used to demonstrate the proposed methodology. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.