Creative Design Based on Multiple Products Fusion With Digital Twin and Fuzzy Decision

Digital twin technology provides novel and efficient means for creative design of new products. However, most digital twin research focuses on the relationship between physical and digital prototypes, and it is worth exploring the approach to design new products from digital twin models of existing products. Hence, this paper presents a creative design method of new products based on the fusion of multiple products. A novel three-layer four-dimensional digital twin framework is proposed with the case-based reasoning design method. Firstly, it decomposes the abstract requirements of new products, and retrieves the existing cases. The digital twin models of multiple existing cases are established to assist the fusion of heterogeneous systems. The original system of new products is constructed by merging the multiple digital twin models. For the importance differences between multiple components in the original system, the fuzzy algorithm of decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory is adopted to rank the components with the triangular fuzzy numbers. After all components are accurately positioned by the digital twin framework according to the layers and dimensions, the redundant components with low importance are pruned. Finally, a new product system with hierarchical dimensions and priorities is obtained. The feasibility of the proposed method is verified by the conceptual design of a new explosion-proof patrol robot.