Extending product life is one of the hopeful approaches to reduce the
environmental issue, which is one of the most critical issues of today.
However, many products are thrown away because of obsolescence of
functions and their performance. Therefore, we should design products to
be functionally upgradable. Moreover, such upgradable products may create
business chances at later stages of product life cycles. The objective of
this research is to propose a design methodology for upgradability. This
methodology employs a functional modeling scheme, FBS modeling, because
upgrade design is a distinctive application of functional design that aims
at maximizing functional flexibility with minimal structural changes after
the product is manufactured. Here, the functional flexibility refers to an
ability of a product to adapt its functions to changes of user needs. This
paper proposes and models design processes and design operations in the
upgrade design. Especially, the methodology supports finding out
candidates of modifications of the function structure and configuration of
a platform, which is common structure of a product among several
generations, and upgrade modules. One of its central issues of upgrade
design is treatment of future uncertainty. For this purpose, we propose
two design strategies: delayed selection of components, and expanding and
shrinking platform. A prototype system and a case study of upgrade design
for a vacuum cleaner are also illustrated. The case study indicates that
the system succeeded in systematically supporting a designer to execute
the design methodology. Regarding the functional design, as an extension
of FBS modeling, this paper proposes a method to relate abstract entity
concepts in FBS modeling to concrete components through a quantitative
behavior model and range calculation, in addition to deployment of FBS
modeling for the design methodology.