Product Platform Design and Optimization: Status and Promise

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Optimization Techniques ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Global Marketplace ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Design And Optimization

In an effort to improve customization for today’s highly competitive global marketplace, many companies are utilizing product families to increase variety, shorten lead-times, and reduce costs. The key to a successful product family is the product platform from which it is derived either by adding, removing, or substituting one or more modules to the platform or by scaling the platform in one or more dimensions to target specific market niches. This nascent field of engineering design research has matured rapidly in the past decade, and this paper provides an extensive review of the research activity that has occurred during that time to facilitate product platform design and optimization. Techniques for identifying platform leveraging strategies within a product family are reviewed along with optimization-based approaches to help automate the design of a product platform and its corresponding family of products. Examples from both industry and academia are presented throughout the paper to highlight the benefits of platform-based product development, and the paper concludes with a discussion of promising research directions to help bridge the gap between planning and managing families of products and designing and manufacturing them.

scholarly journals Product platform design and customization: Status and promise

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY W. SIMPSON
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Global Marketplace ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Product Platforms

In an effort to improve customization for today's highly competitive global marketplace, many companies are utilizing product families and platform-based product development to increase variety, shorten lead times, and reduce costs. The key to a successful product family is the product platform from which it is derived either by adding, removing, or substituting one or more modules to the platform or by scaling the platform in one or more dimensions to target specific market niches. This nascent field of engineering design has matured rapidly in the past decade, and this paper provides a comprehensive review of the flurry of research activity that has occurred during that time to facilitate product family design and platform-based product development for mass customization. Techniques for identifying platform leveraging strategies within a product family are reviewed along with metrics for assessing the effectiveness of product platforms and product families. Special emphasis is placed on optimization approaches and artificial intelligence techniques to assist in the process of product family design and platform-based product development. Web-based systems for product platform customization are also discussed. Examples from both industry and academia are presented throughout the paper to highlight the benefits of product families and product platforms. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential areas of research to help bridge the gap between planning and managing families of products and designing and manufacturing them.

A Tool to Integrate Design for Assembly During Product Platform Design

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amar Pandit ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Design For Assembly ◽  
Design And Development ◽  
Single Product ◽  
Entire Family ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Integrate Design

To survive in the current market, many companies are moving toward design and development of product families using a platform approach. To effectively develop a family of products, companies have to consider both component and assembly perspectives. The assembly perspective has many issues associated with it for developing common platforms, which includes assemblability evaluation for the entire family. Application of Design for Assembly techniques to evaluate product family will require modifications to the current single product DFA method. In this paper a product family DFA tool and guidelines are presented. The application of this product family DFA tool is illustrated using Walkman® and Coffeemaker product family.

Platform-Based Design and Development: Current Trends and Needs in Industry

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Tucker Marion ◽  
Olivier de Weck ◽  
Katja Ho¨ltta¨-Otto ◽  
Michael Kokkolaras ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Design Development ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Strategic Innovation ◽  
Future Work

Many companies constantly struggle to find cost-effective solutions to satisfy the diverse demands of their customers. In this paper, we report on two recent industry-focused conferences that emphasized platform design, development, and deployment as a means to increase variety, shorten lead-times, and reduce development and production costs. The first conference, Platform Management for Continued Growth, was held November–December 2004 in Atlanta, Georgia, and the second, 2005 Innovations in Product Development Conference — Product Families and Platforms: From Strategic Innovation to Implementation, was held in November 2005 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two conferences featured presentations from academia and more than 20 companies who shared their successes and frustrations with platform design and deployment, platform-based product development, and product family planning. Our intent is to provide a summary of the common themes that we observed in these two conferences. Based on this discussion, we extrapolate upon industry’s needs in platform design, development, and deployment to stimulate and catalyze future work in this important area of research.

Global Views on Modular Design Research: Linking Alternative Methods to Support Modular Product Family Concept Development

2016 ◽  
Vol 138 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Otto ◽  
Katja Hölttä-Otto ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Dieter Krause ◽  
Sebastian Ripperda ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Design Research ◽  
Modular Design ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Concept Development ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Modular Product ◽  
Generic Set

Modular product platforms have been shown to provide substantial cost and time savings while still allowing companies to offer a variety of products. As a result, a multitude of product platform methods have been developed over the last decade within the design research community. However, comparison and integration of suitable methods is difficult since the methods have, for the most part, been developed in isolation from one another. In reviewing the literature in modularity and product platforms, we create a generic set of 13 platform design steps for developing a platform concept. We then examine a set of product platform concept development processes used at several different companies, and from this form a generic sequence of the steps. We then associate the various developed methods to the sequence, thereby enabling the chaining together of the various modular and platform design methods developed by the community.

Product Family and Product Platform Benchmarking With Commonality and Variety Indices

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Future Work ◽  
Common Platform

As companies are pressured to reduce costs and lead-times while increasing variety, the need to design products based on common platform “elements” is growing. Product family design has become an effective strategy to meet this challenge, but companies still struggle with assessing how “good” their product family is. Companies routinely benchmark their individual products, but they struggle with how to benchmark their platforms and product families against their competitors. A novel approach for product family benchmarking is introduced in this paper integrating commonality and variety indices to compare competing product families and their platform “elements”. An example involving two families of men’s razors is presented to illustrate the approach. Limitations of the approach and future work are also discussed.

A Tool to Integrate Design for Assembly During Product Platform Design

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amar Pandit ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
New Product ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Design For Assembly ◽  
Single Product ◽  
Entire Family ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Family Architecture ◽  
Integrate Design

To survive in the current market, many companies are moving toward design and development of product families using a platform approach. To effectively develop a family of products companies have to consider both component and assembly perspective. The assembly perspective has many issues associated with it for developing common platforms, which includes assemblability evaluation for the entire family. Application of Design for Assembly techniques to evaluate product family will require modifications to the current single product DFA method. The purpose of this paper is to extend the current DFA technique for product family and platform design. Specifically, we integrate the product family architecture with DFA evaluation. Product family concepts related to assembly are used to develop new product family DFA guidelines. A product family DFA tool that utilizes these extensions has been developed and is presented in the paper. The application of this product family DFA extensions and tool are illustrated using a Walkman product family.

Introduction of a Product Family Penalty Function Using Physical Programming

2002 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 164-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Achille Messac ◽  
Michael P. Martinez ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Penalty Function ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Physical Programming ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Scaling Parameters ◽  
The Common ◽  
Selection Of

In an effort to increase customization for today’s highly competitive global markets, many companies are looking to product families to increase product variety and shorten product lead-times while reducing costs. The key to a successful product family is the common product platform around which the product family is derived. Building on our previous work in product family design, we introduce a product family penalty function (PFPF) in this paper to aid in the selection of common and scaling parameters for families of products derived from scalable product platforms. The implementation of the PFPF utilizes the powerful physical programming paradigm to formulate the problem in terms of physically meaningful parameters. To demonstrate the proposed approach, a family of electric motors is developed and compared against previous results. We find that the PFPF enables us to properly balance commonality and performance within the product family through the judicious selection of the common parameters that constitute the product platform and the scaling parameters used to instantiate the product family.

A Cost Model for Optimal Design of Hierarchic Product Platform under Coupled Architecture

2012 ◽  
Vol 452-453 ◽  
pp. 516-520
Author(s):  
Yan Ling Cai ◽  
Zhen Hua Cui
Keyword(s):  
Optimal Design ◽  
Cost Model ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Flexible Design ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Cost Drivers ◽  
Difficult Decision

Product platform design is essentially a difficult decision to make, thus a hierarchic platform has been proposed to solve the inherent tradeoff for optimization. However, architecture coupling adds on complexity of the platform design. This paper proposes an improved cost model for the optimal design of platform design in the hierarchic manner with the consideration of the architecture coupling. This cost model uniquely treats the architecture couplings and their decoupling interfaces as latent cost drivers to enable the flexible design of product platform and its family. As a support, the underlying tradeoff mechanism of platform-based product family design is also analyzed in this paper.

Product Platform Design Through Sensitivity Analysis and Cluster Analysis

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihuang Dai ◽  
Michael J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Cluster Analysis ◽  
Sensitivity Analysis ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Platform Design ◽  
Efficiency And Effectiveness ◽  
Efficiency Cost ◽  
And Cluster Analysis

Product platform design plays a vital role in determining two important aspects of a products family: efficiency (cost savings due to commonality) and effectiveness (capability to satisfy performance requirements). In this work, sensitivity analysis and cluster analysis are used to improve both efficiency and effectiveness of a product family design. A strategy of commonization is employed to form a platform. An illustrative example is used to demonstrate the merits of the proposed method, and the results are compared with existing results from the literature.

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