On complex systems of adaptive frugal products

Abstract

Frugal products possess a proper mix of features including minimal consumption of resources, good functionality under nominal conditions and low cost. Therefore, increasing use of frugal products, that are designed and also fabricated systematically, is crucial to all-round sustainable development . However, their low factor-of-safety rigorous-design makes them inherently prone to failure under conditions of overloading. And multitudes of such coupled-products would create topologies of interconnected complex systems in the foreseeable future whose individual products should be made to adapt against any events of failure to enhance functionality while maintaining low cost. Accordingly, this paper proposes a two-pronged methodology for adaptation of frugal products along with ramifications of complex systems of frugal products. The adaptation methodology is crucial to the functioning of individual and also networks of frugal products and this work accordingly explicates scenarios of ensuing networks. Other than application to various sectors including electric vehicles , a basic example of which is covered in this paper, the proposed adaptation-and-networking framework can also be applied to a growing numbers of sustainable products, which are frugal according to the terminology of this effort and hence prone to premature failure.