A Cyber-Physical System for Product Conceptual Design Based on an Intelligent Psycho-Physiological Approach

Conceptual design plays an important role in a product development process. Significant development of technologies in the cyber-physical system (CPS) provides innovative approaches for product conceptual design. This paper proposes an architecture of CPS for conceptual design that realizes the acquisition of real-time physiological data from the physical world and the feedback of psychological states from the cyber world. As understanding and meeting the needs of customers have been recognized as significant aspects for conceptual design, an intelligent psycho-physiological approach that incorporates electroencephalogram (EEG) into the Kano model is adopted in this CPS for real-time customer needs analysis. The sample entropy (SampEn) extracted from EEG data is an endogenous neural indicator for customers' psychological states. A support vector machine using this SampEn as input is trained for classifying different categories of quality attributes defined in the Kano model. A case study is conducted to testify the feasibility of the approach proposed in this paper.