Multiple-platform based product family design for mass customization using a modified genetic algorithm

2008 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 577-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chunbao Chen ◽  
Liya Wang
Author(s):  
Li Qian ◽  
David Ben-Arieh

Manufacturers add numerous product variants to address different customer preferences for mass customization. One approach to implement the mass customization is to develop or produce products based on the platform architecture. A platform is a set of common components, modules or parts shared by product variants in one product family. One product variant makes use of the platform as the starting point and then add or remove components to change features of the product. The problem of determining the platform configuration is considered as maximizing the overall profit under the price-dependent demand market environment while satisfying the part assembly constraints. Platform configuration and sale prices are decision variables in the problem. A strategy based on Genetic Algorithm is proposed to solve the illustrating problem involving the product family of cordless drills. Results manifest that the sale price decision could have significant influence on the product family design, e.g. the platform configuration and the profitability of one product family.


2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seung Ki Moon ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams

Companies that generate a variety of products and services are creating, and increasing research on, mass-customized products in order to satisfy customers’ specific needs. Currently, the majority of effort is focused on consumers who are without disabilities. The research presented here is motivated by the need to provide a basis of product design methods for users with some disability—often called universal design (UD). Product family design is a way to achieve cost-effective mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products serving distinct market segments to be developed from a common platform. By extending concepts from product family design and mass customization to universal design, we propose a method for developing and evaluating a universal product family within uncertain market environments. We will model design strategies for a universal product family as a market economy where product family platform configurations are generated through market segments based on a product platform and customers’ preferences. A coalitional game is employed to evaluate which design strategies provide more benefit when included in the platform based on the marginal profit contribution of each strategy. To demonstrate an implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of light-duty trucks.


Author(s):  
Johan O¨lvander ◽  
Xiaolong Feng ◽  
Bo Holmgren

Product family design is a well recognized method to address the demands of mass customization. A potential drawback of product families is that the performance of individual members are reduced due to the constraints added by the common platform, i.e. parts and components need to be shared by other family members. This paper presents a formal mathematical framework where the product family design problem is stated as an optimization problem and where optimization is used to find an optimal product family. The object of study is kinematics design of a family of industrial robots. The robot is a serial manipulator where different robots share arms from a common platform. The objective is to show the trade-off between the size of the common platform and the kinematics performance of the robot.


2011 ◽  
Vol 130-134 ◽  
pp. 2340-2344
Author(s):  
Bin Zhu ◽  
Hong Li

Design for product family is an efficient way to guarantee the idea of mass customization to be implemented successfully. This paper presents an approach to architecting a product family that aims to provide methodological guidance for enterprises which plan to implement strategy of product family design. Based on the conventional methodology of designing for a single product, this paper respectively demonstrates the methods of requirement modeling, function-principle modeling and structure modeling in details according to the characteristics of product family design, and also some key approaches in different design processes are presented.


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