Biologically Inspired Product Architecture: Leveraging Biological Function-Sharing and Robustness in Engineering Design

Abstract

Biological entities often naturally evolve into a complex functional and structural organization to facilitate favorable characteristics for natural selection. Such characteristics include the simultaneous performance of multiple functions by a single structure (function-sharing) and the ability to sustain functionality upon the disruption (robustness). This dissertation work contributes methods by which the complex functional and structural arrangements in biology can be modeled and understood to viably emulate the biological characteristics of function-sharing and robustness in engineering design. To enable such emulation without relying on serendipitous encounters with and the structural imitation of biological adaptations, the presented methods utilize bioinspiration of the three attributes of product architecture: the arrangement of functions, the arrangement of structures into groups called modules, and the corresponding mapping of functions to the structures and the modules. Results from this work can potentially enable the design of engineered systems that are simultaneously compact, light-weight and robust to random module failures.

The methods for bioinspiration of product architecture are presented and validated in three stages. In Stage 1, a product architecture-based modeling tool is developed to enable the abstraction of function-sharing biological adaptations. The tool is then shown to facilitate bioinspired function-sharing in engineered systems through bioinspiration of product architecture. The reliance on biological knowledge to leverage such function-sharing is further reduced in Stage 2 by deducing function-based guidelines for the bioinspired development and arrangement of modules in engineered systems. The qualitative guidelines are deduced by modeling and analyzing the emergence and the arrangement of organs in the animal kingdom. In Stage 3, the bioinspired development and arrangement of modules are shown to facilitate robustness to random module failures in the resultant bioinspired systems. Such emergence of robustness in a system and its consequent tradeoff with the system’s functional effectiveness is established by quantitatively comparing the characteristics of systems with a biological or a bioinspired product architecture to the characteristics of functionally equivalent modular systems.