Optimal Design of Product Family Throughout Commonalization, Customization and Lineup Arrangement

Author(s):  
Kikuo Fujita ◽  
Ryota Akai

Product family design is a framework for effectively and efficiently meeting with spread customers’ needs by sharing components or modules across a series of products. This paper systematizes product family design toward its extension to throughout consideration of commonalization, customization and lineup arrangement under the optimal design paradigm. That is, commonalization is viewed as the operation that restricts the feasible region by fixing a set of design variables related to commonalized components or modules against later customization and final lineup offered to customers. Customization is viewed as the operation that arranges lineup by adjusting another set of design variables related to reserved freedom for customers’ needs. Their mutual and bi-directional relationships must be a matter of optimal design. This paper discusses the mathematical fundamentals of optimal product family design throughout commonalization, customization and lineup arrangement under active set strategy, and demonstrates a case study with a design problem of centrifugal compressors for showing the meaning of throughout optimal design.

1993 ◽  
Vol 115 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-379
Author(s):  
P. Y. Papalambros

Early preliminary models for optimal design problems in nonlinear programming formulations often have solutions that are constraint-bound points, i.e., the number of active constraints equals the number of design variables. Models leading to such solutions will typically offer little insight to design trade-offs, and it is desirable to identify them early in order to revise the model or to exclude the points from an active set strategy. Application of monotonicity analysis can quickly identify constraint-bound candidate solutions but not always prove their optimality. This article discusses some conditions under which these points are in fact global or local optima.


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):  
J. R. J. Rao ◽  
P. Y. Papalambros

Abstract A production system performing global boundedness analysis of optimal design models has been implemented in the OPS5 programming environment. The system receives as input an initial model monotonicity table and derives global facts about boundedness and constraint activity using monotonicity principles. Additional facts may be discovered by heuristic search of implicit elimination sequences that examine boundedness of reduced models with active constraints eliminated. The global facts generated automatically by this reasoning system can be used either for a global solution, or for a combined local-global active set strategy.


Author(s):  
Seung Ki Moon ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Soundar R. T. Kumara

Product family design is a cost-effective way to achieve mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products to be developed from a common platform while targeting individual products to distinct market segments. Recent trends seek to apply and extend principles from product family design to new service development. In this paper, we extend concepts from platform-based product family design to create a novel methodology for module-based service family design. The new methodology helps identify a service platform along with variant and unique modules in a service family by integrating service-based process analysis, ontologies, and data mining. A function-process matrix and a service process model are investigated to define the relationships between the service functions and the service processes offered as part of a service. An ontology is used to represent the relationships between functional hierarchies in a service. Fuzzy clustering is employed to partition service processes into subsets for identifying modules in a given service family. The clustering result identifies the platform and its modules using a platform level membership function. We apply the proposed methodology to determine a new platform using a case study involving a family of banking services.


Author(s):  
Jonathan R. A. Maier ◽  
Georges M. Fadel

Abstract The realization that designing products in families can and does have significant technological and economic advantages over traditional single product design has motivated increasing interest in recent years in formal design tools and methodologies for product family design. However, currently there is no guidance for designers in the first key strategic decisions of product family design, in particular determining the type of product family to design. Hence in this paper, first a taxonomy of different types of product families is presented which consists of seven types of product families, categorized based on number of products and time of product introduction. Next a methodology is introduced to aid designers in determining which type of product family is appropriate, based upon early knowledge about the nature of the intended product(s) and their intended market(s). From this information it also follows both which manufacturing paradigm and which fundamental design strategies are appropriate for the product family. Finally the proposed methodology is illustrated through a case study examining a family of whitewater kayaks.


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