Technical Inheritance: A Concept to Adapt the Evolution of Nature to Product Engineering

Abstract

Nowadays the technological progress of technical products occurs according to the laws of natural selection: new technologies are replacing old ones, winners of the competition are those products that best meet the expectations of society and the requirements of the market. Therefore, using, adapting and modeling of the basic laws of the theory of biological evolution in order to study the evolutionary processes in technical systems are already many years a popular area of research. Modern technical solutions combine the ability to store and transmit information on their technical specifications and accumulated changes from generation to generation. The main research area of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 653 “Gentelligent Components in Their Lifecycle” is the innovative development of smart products in which the genetic and intellectual dimensions are a combination that enables to use the accumulated product life cycle information for the development of subsequent generations adapted to their environment. One of the central questions of the evolution of technical products is how to consider inheritance and the transfer of information. Based on evolutionary mechanisms the definition of technical inheritance as a transfer of assembled and verified information from production and application to the next product generation has been composed. The authors employed the analysis of existing evolutionary theories in biology, evolutionary laws of technical systems and their adaptation as well as the redefining of gentelligent smart products.