At present, the significance of a new manufacturing system that can shift from ‘mass production’ and consider life cycles of a product is pointed out and extremely expected. In such a situation, it is recognized that the modular design, often called ‘unit design,’ is the important design methodology which realizes the new production system enabling ‘cost reduction,’ ‘flexible production of a multi-functional artifact,’ ‘settlement of an environmental issue,’ and so on. A module (unit) of a product is generally defined as ‘the parts group made into the sub-system from a certain specific viewpoint.’ So far, there have been many researches related to the modular design. However, they are often limited to a certain viewpoint (objective). This paper proposes a simple but effective method for multi-objective modular design. In the proposed method, a new design metric, called similarity index, is proposed to evaluate the modular design candidates from the multiple viewpoints.

• 남윤의(국립 한밭대학교 기계공학과) | Yoon-Eui Nahm Corresponding Author
• Haruo Ishikawa(국립대학법인 일본 전기통신대학 지능기계공학과)