Design for product resilience: concept, characteristics and generalisation

Abstract

Potentially high-impact disturbances always disrupt normal product use, cause structural or functional failure, and shorten product life. How to design products with better fault tolerance and recovery capabilities to effectively deal with such complex disturbances will be a key factor in product innovation and intelligence in the future. Resilience is a system's ability to rapidly recover to its full function after disruption, and it is applied across multiple industries. As manufacturing systems and products diversify, this has resulted in an increasing variety of different definitions that threatens to dilute the concept and lead to ineffective implementations of resilient product design. This paper reviews the different definitions and scope of application of resilience in existing research and proposes two general definitions of resilient products from broad and narrow perspectives. On this basis, the author compared product resilience with product reliability, robustness, and adaptability, and proposed four main characteristics of product resilience, including visibility, agility, redundancy, and adaptability. Next, a design principle for product resilience is introduced, and future needs and opportunities for product resilience are outlined.