Designing Robust Systems Using Bioinspired Product Architecture

This work analyzes the role of bioinspired product architecture in facilitating the development of robust engineering systems. Existing studies on bioinspired product architecture largely focus on inspiring biology-like function-sharing in engineering design. This work shows that the guidelines for bioinspired product architecture, originally developed for bioinspiration of function-sharing, may induce robustness to random failures in engineered systems. To quantify such an improvement, this study utilizes Functional Modeling to derive modular equivalents of biological systems. The application of the bioinspired product architecture guidelines is then modeled as a transition from the modular product architecture of the modular equivalents to the actual product architecture of the biological systems. The robustness of the systems to random failures is analyzed after the application of each guideline by modeling the systems as directed networks. A singular robustness metric is then introduced to quantify the degradation in the expected functionality of systems upon increasing severity of random disruptions. Our results show that a system with bioinspired product architecture exhibits a gradual degradation in expected functionality upon increasing the number of failed modules as compared to an equivalent system with a one-to-one mapping of functions to modules. The findings are validated by designing and analyzing a COVID-19 breathalyzer as a case study.