Knowledge Model for Managing Product Variety and Its Reflective Design Process

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yutaka Nomaguchi ◽  
Tomohiro Taguchi ◽  
Kikuo Fujita
Keyword(s):  
Design Process ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Product Architecture ◽  
Air Conditioner ◽  
Knowledge Model ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Reflective Process ◽  
Reflective Design ◽  
Computer Based

Recent manufacturers have been utilizing product families to diversify and enhance the product performance by simultaneously designing multiple products under commonalization and standardization. Design information of product architecture and family is inevitably more complicated and numerous than that of a single product. Thus, more sophisticated computer-based support system is required for product architecture and family design. This paper proposes a knowledge model for a computer-based system to support reflective process of designing product architecture and product family. This research focuses on three problems which should be overcome when product family are modeled in the computer system; design repository without data redundancy and incorrectness, knowledge acquisition without forcing the additional effort on the designer, and integration of prescriptive models to support early stages of the design process. An ontology that is a foundation of a knowledge model is defined to resolve these problems. An example of designing an air conditioner product family is shown to demonstrate the capability of the system.

Complex products and systems: Potential from using layout platforms

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
ADRIAN P. HOFER ◽  
JOHANNES I.M. HALMAN
Keyword(s):  
Market Segmentation ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Product Architecture ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Complex Products ◽  
Dominant Design ◽  
Family Based ◽  
System Layout

In their quest to manage the complexity of offering greater product variety, firms in many industries are considering platform-based development of product families. Key in this approach is the sharing of components, modules, and other assets across a family of products. Current research indicates that companies are often choosing physical elements of the product architecture (i.e., components, modules, building blocks) for building platform-based product families. Other sources for platform potential are widely neglected. We argue that for complex products and systems with hierarchic product architectures and considerable freedom in design, a new platform type, the system layout, offers important commonality potential. This layout platform standardizes the arrangement of subsystems within the product family. This paper is based on three industry case studies, where a product family based on a common layout could be defined. In combination with segment-specific variety restrictions, this results in an effective, efficient, and flexible positioning of a company's products. The employment of layout platforms leads to substantial complexity reduction, and is the basis for competitive advantage, as it imposes a dominant design on a product family, improves its configurability, and supports effective market segmentation.

Advancements in a Web-Based Framework in Product Family Optimization and Visualization

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica L. Mulberger ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Design Process ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Aircraft Design ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
General Aviation ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Ongoing Research ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Number Of Customers

Today’s market is becoming increasingly more competitive as companies strive to achieve success by reaching a large number of customers in a mass market while simultaneously treating them as individuals in a customized market. Many companies have begun to appreciate the benefits of using product platforms as they increase the customizability of their offered products, while reducing development costs and time to market. However, product variety is not customization; it is simply an attempt on the part of a company to meet the individual needs of their customers by flooding the market with many variations of the same product. With recent innovations in the field of information technology, web-based product development methodologies provide the capability for advanced customer involvement during the design process, which is a crucial aspect of differentiating customization from variety. Current approaches have provided web-based frameworks where users are offered a limited amount of control in the design process by assembling different configurations of given modules or by choosing a product already available in the company database. The focus in this paper is on advancements to a web-based framework where design parameters are collected from the user by means of a web-based browser interface, optimization is completed using the specified parameters, and a 3D visual representation is dynamically provided based on the results from the optimization. This proposed framework is illustrated using an example from ongoing research involving General Aviation Aircraft design.

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.

Two Methodologies for Identifying Product Platform Elements Within an Existing Set of Products

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth D. Steva ◽  
Elizabeth N. Rice ◽  
Tucker J. Marion ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Robert B. Stone
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Design Structure ◽  
Development Costs ◽  
Family Analysis ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Single Use

As companies are pressured to decrease product development costs concurrently with increasing product variety, the need to develop products based upon common components and platforms is growing. Determining why a platform worked, or alternatively why it did not, is an important step in the successful implementation of product families and product platforms in any industry. Unfortunately, published literature on platform identification and product family analysis using product dissection and reverse engineering methods is surprisingly sparse. This paper introduces two platform identification methodologies that use different combinations of tools that can be readily applied based on information obtained directly from product dissection. The first methodology uses only the Bills-of-Materials and Design Structure Matrices while the second utilizes function diagrams, Function-Component Matrices, Product-Vector Matrices, and Design Structure Matrices to perform a more in-depth analysis of the set of products. Both methodologies are used to identify the platform elements in a set of five single-use cameras available in the market. The proposed methodologies identify the film advance and shutter actuation platform elements of the cameras, which include seven distinct components. The results are discussed in detail along with limitations of these two methodologies.

Graph Grammar Based Product Variety Modeling

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuehong Du ◽  
Mitchell M. Tseng ◽  
Jianxin Jiao
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Graph Grammar ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Order Processing ◽  
Product Features ◽  
The Family ◽  
Feature Values ◽  
Data Transferring ◽  
A Company

Abstract This paper discusses the issue of product variety modeling, i.e. the means to organize the data of a family of products according to the underpinning logic among them. The targeted product families are characterized by providing user-selectable product features and feature values and achieving variety by combining parameterized functional or physical modules. A graph grammar based (GGB) model is proposed for the purpose of enhancing the comprehensiveness and manipulability of the data of product families for different functional departments in a company in order to facilitate effective order processing as well as direct customer-manufacturer interaction. To deal with variety effectively, both structural and non-structural family data are represented as family graphs whereas order-specific products are represented as variant graphs derived by applying predefined graph rewrite rules to the family graphs. The most important characteristics of the GGB model are three folds. While emphasizing the distinctiveness of the information that different users are concerned about, it provides cross view data transferring mechanisms. It also supports data manipulation for variety generation. Finally, taking advantage of the graph grammar based language of PROGRES, GGB is a model to be easily implemented as a visualized computer system. The specification of an office chair product family illustrates the principles and construction process of GGB models.

Concurrent Design of Product Families and Assembly Systems

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Bryan ◽  
S. J. Hu ◽  
Y. Koren
Keyword(s):  
System Design ◽  
Concurrent Engineering ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Assembly System ◽  
Concurrent Design ◽  
Assembly Systems ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Assembly System Design

In order to gain competitive advantage, manufacturers require cost effective methods for developing a variety of products within short time periods. Product families, reconfigurable assembly systems and concurrent engineering are frequently used to achieve this desired cost effective and rapid supply of product variety. The independent development of methodologies for product family design and assembly system design has led to a sequential approach to the design of product families and assembly systems. However, the designs of product families and assembly systems are interdependent and efficiencies can be gained through their concurrent design. There are no quantitative concurrent engineering techniques that address the problem of the concurrent design of product families and assembly systems. In this paper, a non-linear integer programming formulation for the concurrent design of a product family and assembly system is introduced. The problem is solved with a genetic algorithm. An example is used to demonstrate the advantage of the concurrent approach to product family and assembly system design over the existing sequential methodology.

Effective Product Family Design Using Preference Aggregation

2005 ◽  
Vol 128 (4) ◽  
pp. 659-667 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihuang Dai ◽  
Michael J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Superior Performance ◽  
Preference Aggregation ◽  
Optimization Approach ◽  
Product Families ◽  
New Methods ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Effective Product

The development of product families, groups of products that share a common platform, is one way to provide product variety while keeping design and production costs low. The design of a product platform can be formulated as a multicriteria optimization problem in which the performances of individual products trade off against each other and against the objective of platform standardization. The problem is often solved in two stages: one to determine the values of the shared platform variables and a second to optimize the product family members with respect to specific targets. In the first stage, it is common to target the mean and variability of performance when fixing the values of platform variables. This paper contributes three new methods for platform development. The new methods are demonstrated on an electric motor example from the platform design literature, and the results are compared to those from existing methods. First, a preference aggregation method is applied to aggregate the multiple objectives into a single overall objective function. On the example problem, this approach gives superior results to existing techniques. Second, an alternative method that targets the minimum and maximum of the range of performance across the platform, instead of the mean and standard deviation, is proposed and shown to succeed where the existing method may fail. Third, a single-stage optimization approach which solves for both platform and nonplatform variables in a single pass is presented. This method delivers notably superior performance on the example problem but will, in general, incur greater computational expense.

Recent Advancements in Product Family Design and Platform-Based Product Development: A Literature Review

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhila Pirmoradi ◽  
G. Gary Wang
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Practical Case ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Design And Optimization ◽  
Future Design ◽  
Research Areas ◽  
Research Activities

Increase of demand on product variety has pushed companies to think about offering more and more product variants in order to take more market shares. However, product variation can lead to cost increase for design and production, as well as the lead time for new variants. As a result, a proper tradeoff is required between cost-effectiveness of manufacturing and satisfying diverse demands. Such tradeoff has been shown to be manageable effectively by exploiting product family design (PFD) and platform-based product development. These strategies have been widely studied during the past decades, and a large number of approaches have been proposed for covering different issues and steps related to design and development of product families and platforms. Verification and performance of such approaches have also been traced through practical case studies applied to several industries. This paper focuses on a review of the research in this field and efforts to classify the recent advancements relevant to product family design and platform development issues. A comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art research in this field was done by Jiao et al. in 2007; therefore the main focus of this paper is on the research activities from 2006 to present. Mainly, the effort of this paper is to identify new achievements in regard with different aspects of product family design such as customer involvement in design, market driven studies, new indices and metrics for assessing families and developing the desired platforms, issues relevant to product family optimization (i.e., new algorithms and optimization approaches applied to different PFD problems along with their benefits and limitations in comparison to previously developed approaches), issues relevant to development of platforms (i.e., platform configuration approaches, joint platform design and optimization, and factors effective on forming proper platform types), and issues relevant to knowledge management and modeling of families and platforms for facilitating and supporting future design efforts. Through a comparison with previous research, new achievements are discussed and the remaining challenges and potential new research areas in this field are addressed.

scholarly journals DESIGN FOR FUTURE VARIETY TO ENABLE LONG-TERM BENEFITS OF MODULAR PRODUCT FAMILIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 993-1002
Author(s):  
Erik Greve ◽  
Christoph Fuchs ◽  
Bahram Hamraz ◽  
Marc Windheim ◽  
Dieter Krause
Keyword(s):  
Value Chain ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Architecture ◽  
Great Effort ◽  
Allocation Model ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Modular Product ◽  
Critical Components ◽  
A Company

AbstractBy developing and using modular product families, large savings can be achieved through reuse and combinability along the entire value chain of a company. Since these potentials often have a very long-term character, the lifetime of a modular product family should be as long as possible. Change drivers, such as changing customer and production requirements, however, result in changes having to be made to the initially developed modular product family, which not only causes a great effort but also prevents the long-term benefits from being fully exploited. With the Change Allocation Model, we introduce a tool that makes it possible to align the essential future changes to the product architecture and to identify and redesign the change-critical components taking into account the existing component variety of the product family. This enables future changes in variety to be considered in the product architecture and a future robust modular product family to be developed. The new visualization is illustrated using the example of a product family of pressure regulating valves and is finally discussed with regard to further potentials and challenges.

Managing Variety in Product Families Through Design for Commonality

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sridhar Kota ◽  
Kannan Sethuraman
Keyword(s):  
New Technologies ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Objective Measure ◽  
Value Added ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
New Product ◽  
Product Line ◽  
Product Portfolio ◽  
Product Complexity ◽  
Product Families

Abstract Majority of companies develop a family of products and many new product variations are added to the product portfolio regularly to meet changing market needs and/or to attract new customer base. Although, the core functionality remains essentially unchanged across all products within a family, new functions, new feature combinations and new technologies are incorporated into each new product. The component variations, commonly referred to as “complexity”, grow exponentially resulting in loss of productivity and/or quality. The challenge lies in effective management of product variations in the design studies and on the manufacturing floor. The key is to minimize non-value added variations across models within a product family without limiting customer choices. Although the benefits of standardization are widely known and most companies do standardize stock components such as fasteners, they are far from standardizing their product -specific core components and thus fail to reap significant benefits in quality and cost. Through this research, we are developing new methodologies for improved management of product variety to achieve higher productivity. In this paper, we discuss the factors that contribute to product complexity in general, and present an objective measure, called the Product Line Commonality Index, to capture the level of part commonality in a product family. Through our Walkman case study, we illustrate robust design/manufacturing strategies, including modularity and postponement of product differentiation, that help minimize non-value added variation across models within a product family1 without limiting customer choices. Finally, we present a simple and yet a powerful method of benchmarking product families or companies in their ability to share parts effectively (modularity) and reduce the total number of parts (multi-functionality) used in product families.

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