scholarly journals Extending the product family approach to support n-dimensional and hierarchical product lines

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.M. Thompson ◽  
M.P.E. Heimdahl
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Family Approach

Assessing Functional and Shape Differentiation Within a Family of Products

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrice Alizon ◽  
Jing Fu ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Sanjay B. Joshi ◽  
Steven B. Shooter
Keyword(s):  
Product Differentiation ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Shape Index ◽  
Functional Differentiation ◽  
Competitive Advantages ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Two Indices ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Shape Differentiation

Market differentiation strategies must identify competitive advantages when offering a line of products varying in features, price, quality, and/or aesthetics. Although this concept is well-known, many companies still have difficulties positioning their own products within their own product lines and against competitors. Few approaches combine two or more facets to answer the product differentiation problem. In this study, two novel indices are proposed to audit shape and functional differentiation within a family of products. The shape index appraises the shape similarity between the products upon digitization, while the functional assessment is based on functions characteristics of the product. Customers’ perception data is obtained experimentally and compared to these indices to validate the result. Pairs of products are evaluated, and the average scores are considered as the indices for a product family. A case study illustrates the usage of these two indices and performance of these tools as well. This approach can be used during detailed studies as well as early stages of the design process to help validate product family positioning.

scholarly journals Efficient Regression Testing of Software Product Lines by Reducing Redundant Test Executions

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (23) ◽  
pp. 8686
Author(s):  
Pilsu Jung ◽  
Sungwon Kang ◽  
Jihyun Lee
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Software Product Lines ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Regression Testing ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Test Cases ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Test Selection ◽  
Software Product ◽  
Regression Test

Regression testing for software product lines (SPLs) is challenging because it must ensure that all the products of a product family work correctly whenever changes are made. One approach to reducing the cost of regression testing is the regression test selection (RTS), which selects a subset of regression test cases. However, even when RTS is applied, SPL regression testing can still be expensive because, in the product line context, each test case can be executed on more than one product that reuses the test case, which would typically result in a large number of test executions. A promising direction is to eliminate redundant test executions of test cases. We propose a method that, given a test case, identifies a set of products, on which the test case will cover the same sequence of source code statements and produce the same testing results, and then excludes these products from products to apply the test case to. The evaluation results showed that when the full selection approach and the approach of repetitively applying an RTS method for a single software system are used for test selection, our method reduced, respectively, 59.3% and 40.0% of the numbers of test executions of the approaches.

A Product Platform Development Method Using QFD

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaeil Park ◽  
Dongmin Shin
Keyword(s):  
Quality Function Deployment ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Development Method ◽  
Major Market ◽  
Technical Requirements ◽  
Platform Development ◽  
Product Platform Development ◽  
Common Components

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was initially developed to aid in designing a quality product by interconnecting customer needs in a market segment with technical requirements. Although it assists in improving product quality, it does not have a function to examine technical requirements across the major market segments serviced by a company’s product lines and to aid in developing product platform concepts. In this paper, we present a product platform development method using QFD that aids in developing platform concepts as well as improving the understanding of product family design. This method includes platform planning and platform concept exploration. Platform planning describes the extent to which a variety of products share common components, and platform concepts then are explored, which are the arrangement of common components. This paper uses an electric razor example to illustrate the proposed method.

An Extension of the Commonality Index for Product Family Optimization

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aida Khajavirad ◽  
Jeremy J. Michalek
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Companion Paper ◽  
Manufacturing Cost ◽  
Discrete Problem ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Continuous Space ◽  
Product Family Optimization ◽  
Gradient Based ◽  
Commonality Index

One critical aim of product family design is to offer distinct variants that attract a variety of market segments while maximizing the number of common parts to reduce manufacturing cost. Several indices have been developed for measuring the degree of commonality in existing product lines to compare product families or assess improvement of a redesign. In the product family optimization literature, commonality metrics are used to define the multi-objective tradeoff between commonality and individual variant performance. These metrics for optimization differ from indices in the first group: While the optimization metrics provide desirable computational properties, they generally lack the desirable properties of indices intended to act as appropriate proxies for the benefits of commonality, such as reduced tooling and supply chain costs. In this paper, we propose a method for computing the commonality index introduced by Martin and Ishii using the available input data for any product family without predefined configuration. The proposed method for computing the commonality index, which was originally defined for binary formulations (common / not common), is relaxed to the continuous space in order to solve the discrete problem with a series of continuous relaxations, and the effect of relaxation on the metric behavior is investigated. Several relaxation formulations are examined, and a new function with desirable properties is introduced and compared with prior formulations. The new properties of the proposed metric enable development of an efficient and robust single-stage gradient-based optimization of the joint product family platform selection and design problem, which is examined in a companion paper.

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