Modular design is a widely used strategy that meets diverse customer requirements. Close relationships exist between parts inside a module and loose linkages between modules in the modular products. A change of one part or module may cause changes of other parts or modules, which in turn propagate through a product. This paper aims to present an approach to analyze the associations and change impacts between modules and identify influential modules in modular product design. The proposed framework explores all possible change propagation paths (CPPs), and measures change impact degrees between modules. In this article, a design structure matrix (DSM) is used to express dependence relationships between parts, and change propagation trees of affected parts within module are constructed. The influence of the affected part in the corresponding module is also analyzed, and a reachable matrix is employed to determine reachable parts of change propagation. The parallel breadth-first algorithm is used to search propagation paths. The influential modules are identified according to their comprehensive change impact degrees that are computed by the bat algorithm. Finally, a case study on the grab illustrates the impacts of design change in modular products.

The product modularity has an important influence on the whole product life cycle. In order to improve product recovery of a used product at the end‐of‐life stage, it is imperative to develop modular product architecture with remanufacturing strategies consideration. In this paper, an integrated modular design method for green remanufacturing considering hierarchical structure of the product and fuzzy logic is proposed, and the modularity of the architecture from the viewpoint of product remanufacturing is assessed. The transfer network of failure mode‐recycling decision using BP neural network optimized by adaptive genetic algorithm is built. Design structure matrix is employed to represent the relationships between components, and the hierarchical structure of product modularity with functionality, physical connection as well as geometric position is constructed. The failure modes of used components are analyzed, and four modular drivers with remanufacturing strategies consideration, namely, recycling mode, component lifetime, material compatibility, and remanufacturing processability, are introduced to reconstruct the modular product architecture for remanufacturing. Finally, an example on the grab is provided to illustrate the proposed method for product modularity taking into account function, structure as well as remanufacturing characteristics.

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