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Determination Of A Graph's Chromatic Number For Part Consolidation In Axiomatic Design, Jeffery Anthony Cavallaro

Master's Theses

Mechanical engineering design practices are increasingly moving towards a framework called axiomatic design (AD). A key tenet of AD is to decrease the information content of a design in order to increase the chance of manufacturing success. An important way to decrease information content is to fulfill multiple functional requirements (FRs) by a single part: a process known as part consolidation. One possible method for determining the minimum number of required parts is to represent a design by a graph, where the vertices are the FRs and the edges represent the need to separate their endpoint FRs into separate parts. …