Purpose: Because of the multiple design elements and complicated relationship among design elements of complex products design, it is tough for designers to systematically and dynamically express and manage the complex products design process.Design/methodology/approach: To solve these problems, a supernetwork model of complex products design is constructed and analyzed in this paper. First, the design elements (customer demands, design agents, product structures, design tasks and design resources) are identified and analyzed, then the sub-network of design elements are built. Based on this, a supernetwork model of complex products design is constructed with the analysis of the relationship among sub-networks. Second, some typical and physical characteristics (robustness, vulnerability, degree and betweenness) of the supernetwork were calculated to analyze the performance of supernetwork and the features of complex product design process.Findings: The design process of a wind turbine is studied as a case to illustrate the approach in this paper. The supernetwork can provide more information about collaborative design process of wind turbine than traditional models. Moreover, it can help managers and designers to manage the collaborative design process and improve collaborative design efficiency of wind turbine.Originality/value: The authors find a new method (complex network or supernetwork) to describe and analyze complex mechanical product design.

Complex mechanical products are a priority area of advanced manufacturing strategy in the USA and Europe. Excellent models for design processes of complex mechanical products are essential for managers or designers to manage design processes and further improve design efficiency. Multiple elements and complicated relationships between elements in the design processes of complex mechanical products cause difficulties in systematically and quantitatively expressing the design processes. Therefore, we put forth a supernetwork-based model for designing complex mechanical products. First, we identified the key elements in the design processes of complex mechanical products. Next, based on this we analyzed sub-elements of the key elements and relationships between sub-elements. Then we built sub-networks with sub-elements as nodes and their relationships as edges and the supernetwork model for design processes of complex mechanical products based on the sub-networks and their relationships. Meanwhile, we also present a method for combining linguistic variables with the corresponding triangular fuzzy numbers, and a max/min synthesis method to accurately compute the edge weights. Finally, we suggest the practical applications of the proposed model and give a comparison of the proposed model and existing ones to verify the feasibility and validity of this study.