Rethinking Morphological Analysis Application for Concept Synthesis in Engineering Design

In a globalised world, enterprises are forced to deal with challenging market conditions. Customers’ demand for individualised products increases and de-sign processes need to be faster and cost efficient. Engineering departments are forced to bring up new approaches to remain competitive. Hence, systematic innovation is vital for success. One way to address concept generation is the analysis of functions and their division into sub-functions, for which several principle solutions can be designed or taken from catalogues. Those individual solutions can be combined with the help of morphological boxes to obtain so-called overall solutions. Although widely published, this method is not well-established in industrial application and often misused in academia: it does not prevent bad decisions. The large number of possible overall solutions resulting from combinatorial explosion is still not manageable. A literature review is conducted to understand the initial aim of morphological analyses. Two contradicting directions can be observed: the search for solutions either towards innovation potential or towards technical feasibility. Both come with drawbacks. To overcome these shortages, a new method is presented intending to support engineers. It is founded on the hypothesis that taking context information into account reduces the overall effort. This leads to an iterative approach with gradually substantiating applications of low-complexity morphological boxes. Mathematical concepts like pareto-efficiency are integrated to optimise the multiplicity resulting from combination. An accompanying software tool is presented. Concluding, a discussion of both method and tool in an application example for next generation machine tool concept elaboration is conducted.