“Basically, if I have no intention of using a service then I won’t bother reverse-engineering it.” ― Jon Johansen: An Australian aviator.
Before discussing reverse engineering, it makes sense to look at what engineering itself is. Engineering is a discipline of knowledge involved in designing, manufacturing, constructing and maintaining of physical products, systems and structures. On a broader scale, there are two kinds of engineering: forward engineering and reserve engineering.
While forward engineering is related with transforming high-level abstraction and logical designed to physical products or systems, reverse engineering is related to the duplication of an existing component, subassembly or products without the help of drawing, documentation, or computer aided design (CAD).
In layman’s term, it can be said that reverse engineering (also called backward engineering or simply back engineering) is a process or method through the application of which one tries to understand through deductive reasoning how a product, process, system, or a piece of software accomplished a particular task with minimal insight into how exactly it does so.
The concept of reverse engineering is applicable in almost all the fields, most notably in computer engineering, mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, software engineering, chemical engineering and space engineering.
Reserve engineering can be termed as the process of analyzing a system or product to:
- Identify the system’s component and their interrelationships,
- Conceive the representatives of the systems at a higher level of construct,
- Create the materialized representative of system under observation.
Reverse engineering is not a new concept to a large number of diversified sector like entertainment, automotive, microchips, consumer products, electronics, chemicals, and mechanical designs. It is not uncommon to find that, when a new product comes to market, rival manufacturers may buy one product and undo it to learn how it was built and how it works. A chemical enterprise may use reverse engineering to counter a patent on a competitor’s manufacturing process. In civil engineering, designs of bridge and building are imitated from past masterpieces so there will be minimal chances of catastrophic failure. In software engineering, good source code is often a variation of other good source code.
Also read: Lateral Thinking And Innovation Process – A Study
In the good old days, designers face problems in shaping their ideas by using clay, plaster, wood, or foam rubber, but a CAD model is essentially needed to enable the manufacturing of that product. Designers have found an inverse correlation between organic shape of products and CAD. As a product becomes more organic in shape, designing it CAD becomes next to impossible. There is no guarantee that the CAD model will be a close to the carved model. Reverse engineering provides a remarkable solution to this problem because the physical product is the source of information for the CAD model. This is also referred to as the part-to-CAD process.
Why Reverse Engineering is necessary?
Following are some of reasons why reverse engineering is necessary for a part or product:
- Non-availability of the product,
- Inadequate or insufficient documentation of the original design,
- Non-existence of the original manufacturer of the product, despite needs by the customers,
- The original design documentation has been lost or never existed,
- Some not-so-good features of a product need to be designed out,
- To further strengthen the good features of a product based on long-term usage of the product,
- To analyze the good and not-so-good features of products of competitors,
- To explore the new avenues to further improve product performance and features,
- To gain competitive quality methods to understand competitor’s products and develop better products,
- The original CAD model is not sufficient to support modifications or existing manufacturing methods,
- The original supplier is unable or unwilling to provide additional parts,
- The original equipment manufacturers (OEM) are either unwilling or unable to provide replacement parts, or demand inflated costs for required parts,
- To update obsolete materials or archaic manufacturing processes with more current, less-expensive and user-friendly technologies.
Common uses of Reverse Engineering
Reverse engineering offers manufacturers with data about the design of a product or component. If done successfully, reverse engineering gives a virtual copy of the blueprint that went into the original design. Reverse engineering is perhaps the most prudent way to regenerate the designs for items that went out of production decades before.
Below are some of the most common uses of reverse engineering.
Legacy Parts Replacement: A common reverse engineering application is legacy parts replacement, which deals in examining and reproducing selected parts of larger machines to keep them in operation. Depending on the magnitude and veracity of the component in question, the initial cost to have it reverse engineered could exceed the price of a newer or different model. However, once you have created a digital copy of the original design and successfully replicated the part, you can use that information to recreate the component again and again using the economies of scale concept. Reverse engineering allows to reproduce parts that work in your preferred mechanical setups, regardless of whether the original manufacturers are still in business.
Parts Service or Repair: If a legacy part or a component, the OEM no longer supports, needs repair or service, it pays to have an understanding of how the product works. This understanding can facilitate in completing the repair accurately and efficiently. If there aren’t any design documents available, a company may opt for reverse engineering to create them.
Failure Analysis: Reverse engineering techniques can play a vital role in failure analysis. If a machine’s performance fails, you may need to take it apart or examine design files to determine why. Once you have this information, you know how to fix or improve the product so that it functions properly and smoothly again.
Parts Improvement: Reverse engineering is also helpful for parts development. You might need to alter a component after conducting a failure analysis, or a particular component might just be due for an upgrade. If no replacement or alternative part is available, you could have the part reverse engineered to create a copy of the original design.
Diagnostics and Problem-Solving: Reverse engineering can also be helpful for diagnostics and problem-solving in a sequence of industrial landscape. In a factory setting, the flow of operations can sometimes go slow due to an inappropriate or underperforming function. When a manufacturing system consists of numerous machines and components, it can be difficult to gauge the origin of the problem. Through reverse engineering, you can determine how everything works as one and use that knowledge to identify where things can and do go wrong.
It can safely be concluded that reverse engineering begins with the product, continues with design process in the opposite direction to end at the product definition statement. In doing so, it unearths as much information as possible about the design ideas that were used to manufacture a particular product.
