Nowadays, product development is challenged by increasing system complexity and stringent time-to-market. To handle the demanding market requirements, knowledge from prior product generations is used to derive new, but partially similar product versions. The concept of product generation engineering, hence, allows manufacturers to release high-quality products within short development times. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to evaluate the similarity of two product implementations based on the concept of the Hamming distance. This allows the usage of similarity information in various heuristics as well as in strategies and thus, to improve the product design process. In a wide set of cases, we investigate the quality and similarity of design points. In the experiments, the use of strategies leads to significantly short searching times, but also tends to be too restrictive in certain cases. Simultaneously, the quality of the solutions found in the heuristic design space exploration has been shown to be as good or better than for the search from scratch and considerably closer solutions as part of the non-dominated solution front have been found.

如今，产品开发面临着系统复杂性增加和上市时间紧迫的挑战。为了满足苛刻的市场需求，前几代产品的知识被用来派生新的但部分相似的产品版本。因此，产品生成工程的概念使制造商能够在较短的开发时间内发布高质量的产品。因此，在本文中，我们提出了一种基于汉明距离概念的新方法来评估两个产品实现的相似性。这允许在各种启发法和策略中使用相似性信息，从而改进产品设计过程。在大量案例中，我们调查了设计点的质量和相似性。在实验中，策略的使用导致搜索时间显着缩短，但在某些情况下也往往限制过多。同时，在启发式设计空间探索中找到的解决方案的质量已被证明与从头开始的搜索一样好或更好，并且作为非支配解决方案前沿的一部分，已经找到了相当接近的解决方案。