Graph Grammar Based Product Family Modeling

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuehong Du ◽  
Jianxin Jiao ◽  
Mitchell M. Tseng
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Graph Grammar ◽  
Formal Representation ◽  
Production Rules ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Economy Of Scale ◽  
Graph Language ◽  
Attributed Graph ◽  
Family Based ◽  
Complex Relationships

Many industries are shifting from mass production to mass customization, which demands quick response to the needs of individual customers with high quality and low costs. The development of product families has received an increasing interest in recent years because, by sharing components across products, a family of products can be derived to cater variety while maintaining the economy of scale. Aiming at the computerization, and eventual automation, of product family design, this paper tackles the formal representation issue surrounding this economically important class of engineering design problem. Breaking free from conventional understanding of product families, which is limited as shared components, the paper defines a product family as a structured system to create variety of products with shared core product technologies. It not only involves the shared base product, but also encompasses customization modules, standard designs, and primary patterns of variety to generate custom designs. The paper introduces graph grammar formalisms to the modeling of such a product family. Based on Programmed Attributed Graph Grammars (PAGG), the graph language is developed to specify the design space of the product family. The process of customizing the base product through manipulating particular modules is modeled by rewriting the starting graph using a series of productions according to the control diagram. Configuration constraints are dealt with by defining application conditions for production rules. Control diagrams are constructed to capture complex relationships among modules and used to control the application sequence of production rules. A case study of power supplies is presented to demonstrate the potential of the graph grammar based modeling approach.

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.

Design Project Modularization for Product Families

2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Qianli Xu ◽  
Jianxin Roger Jiao
Keyword(s):  
Project Management ◽  
Modular Design ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Project Planning ◽  
Support Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Modeling And Analysis ◽  
Design Project ◽  
Economy Of Scale ◽  
Design Activities

Design project management involves sophisticated task planning that needs to streamline a number of design activities while properly allocating resources associated with these activities. In the field of product family design, there is a lack of comprehensive modeling and analysis formalisms for design project management. In this respect, this paper proposes a modular design project approach to support design project modeling and planning for product families. Design activities are identified as project modules according to the activity sequences, along with the players and resources involved in each activity. A generic variety structure is introduced to characterize the differentiation of design activities among various project variants of the family. Based on the identified modules of activities, design project planning is formulated as a project reconfiguration problem, for which genetic algorithms are employed for configuration evaluation. A case study of truck cab family design in an automobile company demonstrates that design project modularization enhances the coordination of multiple design projects of product families and contributes to the achievement of economy of scale through reusing proven elements.

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.

Process Platform-Based Production Configuration

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lianfeng Zhang ◽  
Jianxin Jiao ◽  
Shaligram Pokharel
Keyword(s):  
Effective Means ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Process Data ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Economy Of Scale ◽  
Production Configuration ◽  
Process Platform

In nowadays’ changing manufacturing environment, designing product families based on product platforms has been well accepted as an effective means to fulfill product customization. The current production practice and academic research of platform based product development mostly focus on the design domain, whereas limited attention is paid to how production can take advantage of product families for realizing economy of scale through enormous repetitions. This paper puts forward a concept of process platforms, based on which an efficient and cost saving production configuration for new members of a product family can be achieved. A process platform implies three aspects, including generic representation, generic structures and generic planning. The issues and rationale of production configuration based on a process platform are presented. A multilevel system of nested colored object-oriented Petri Nets with changeable structures is proposed to model the configuration of production processes. To construct a process platform from existing process data, a data mining approach based on text mining and tree matching is introduced to identify the generic process structure of a process family. An industrial example of high variety production of vibration motors for hand phones is also reported.

Improving an Existing Product Family Based on Commonality/Diversity, Modularity, and Cost

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrice Alizon ◽  
Steven B. Shooter ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Diversity Index ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Value Analysis ◽  
New Family ◽  
Design Structure ◽  
Cad Models ◽  
Family Based ◽  
Definition Of

As product life cycles become shorter and shorter, stakes are higher in terms of sales and profits, making it an imperative for companies to enhance existing product families as much as possible. Redesigning a family of products can become a difficult task when considering the number of variables (products, modules, components, etc.), competing objectives (diversity-commonality, cost-variety, etc.), and actual technical solutions (cost value, architectural constraints), etc. In this paper, a methodology using the Design Structure Matrix flow (DSMflow), Value Analysis (VA), and the Commonality versus Diversity Index (CDI) is proposed to improve an existing family of products. These three tools enable the assessment and the improvement of (1) commonality and diversity within the family, (2) feature satisfaction through design, and (3) definition of new modules/components and their interfaces. A case study based on a family of refrigerators (including CAD models) is detailed in this paper to demonstrate the methodology. The proposed methodology supports both the reengineering of an existing family and can also be extended to benefit the early development stages when designing a new family of products.

scholarly journals Design of Personalized Devices—The Tradeoff between Individual Value and Personalization Workload

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Juliane Kuhl ◽  
Andreas Ding ◽  
Ngoc Tuan Ngo ◽  
Andres Braschkat ◽  
Jens Fiehler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Customer Value ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Treatment Success ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Flow Diverter ◽  
New Method ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Value

Personalized medical devices adapted to the anatomy of the individual promise greater treatment success for patients, thus increasing the individual value of the product. In order to cater to individual adaptations, however, medical device companies need to be able to handle a wide range of internal processes and components. These are here referred to collectively as the personalization workload. Consequently, support is required in order to evaluate how best to target product personalization. Since the approaches presented in the literature are not able to sufficiently meet this demand, this paper introduces a new method that can be used to define an appropriate variety level for a product family taking into account standardized, variant, and personalized attributes. The new method enables the identification and evaluation of personalizable attributes within an existing product family. The method is based on established steps and tools from the field of variant-oriented product design, and is applied using a flow diverter—an implant for the treatment of aneurysm diseases—as an example product. The personalization relevance and adaptation workload for the product characteristics that constitute the differentiating product properties were analyzed and compared in order to determine a tradeoff between customer value and personalization workload. This will consequently help companies to employ targeted, deliberate personalization when designing their product families by enabling them to factor variety-induced complexity and customer value into their thinking at an early stage, thus allowing them to critically evaluate a personalization project.

Algorithm-Based Support for the Redesign of Product Variants

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Redeker ◽  
Philipp Gebhardt ◽  
Thomas Vietor
Keyword(s):  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Graph Matching ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Production Volume ◽  
Scale Production ◽  
Product Families ◽  
First Case ◽  
Subtractive Manufacturing ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract Incremental Manufacturing is a novel manufacturing approach where product variants are manufactured based on a finalization of pre-produced parts through additive and subtractive manufacturing processes. This approach allows a multi-scale production with the possibility to scale product variants as well as the production volume. In order to ensure high economic efficiency of the manufacturing concept, there is a need for pre-produced parts that come as close as possible to the final variant geometries to ensure that only variant-specific features need to be added by additive or subtractive manufacturing steps. Furthermore, to ensure high economies of scale, a high degree of commonality should be ensured for the pre-produced parts manufactured in mass production. In this context, a graph-based method is developed that enables an automated analysis of product families, based on physical and functional attributes, for standardization potentials. The method thus provides support for the strategic definition of pre-produced parts and is embedded in an overall approach for the redesign of products for Incremental Manufacturing. For the demonstration of the approach, which is based on 3D Shape and Graph Matching methods, a first case study is carried out using a guiding bush product family as an example.

scholarly journals A Framework for Development Architecture for Modular Products: Cross-Domain Variety Management Perspective

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 2921-2930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwansuk Oh ◽  
Jong Wook Lim ◽  
Seongwon Cho ◽  
Junyeol Ryu ◽  
Yoo S. Hong
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Development Stage ◽  
Real Field ◽  
Reference Architecture ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Cross Domain ◽  
Architecture Framework ◽  
Management Perspective ◽  
Domain Mapping ◽  
The Cross

AbstractVariety management is a cross-domain issue in product family design. In the real field, the relationships across the domains are so complex for most of the existing product families that they cannot be easily identified without proper reference architecture. This reference architecture should provide the cross- domain mapping mechanisms in an explicit manner and be able to identify the proper units for management. From this perspective of cross-domain framework, this paper introduces development architecture (DA) to describe the relationships between elements in market, design, and production domains and to give insights for the cross-domain variety management in the product development stage. DA has three parts: (1) the arrangement of elements in each domain, (2) the mapping between elements, and (3) the identification of management sets and key interfaces which are the proper units for variety management. The proposed development architecture framework is applied to the case of front chassis family of modules of an automobile.

Optimal Kinematics Design of an Industrial Robot Family

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan O¨lvander ◽  
Xiaolong Feng ◽  
Bo Holmgren
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
Industrial Robot ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Industrial Robots ◽  
Mathematical Framework ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Product Families ◽  
The Common ◽  
Object Of Study ◽  
Common Platform

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.

Designing a Product Package Platform

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Devendorf ◽  
Kemper Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Design Theory ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Optimal Arrangement ◽  
Family Identity ◽  
Product Packaging ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Identity ◽  
Cereal Boxes ◽  
Planning Graph ◽  
Paper Product

An essential part of designing a successful product family is establishing a recognizable, familiar, product family identity. It is very often the case that consumers first identify products based on their physical embodiment. The Apple iPod, DeWalt power tools, and KitchenAid appliances are all examples of product families that have successfully branded themselves based on physical principles. While physical branding is often the first trait apparent to designers, there are some products that cannot be differentiated based on physical appearance. This is especially common for consumable products. For example, it is impossible to differentiate between diet Coke, Classic Coke, and Pepsi when each is poured into separate glasses. When differentiation is difficult to achieve from a product’s physical characteristics, the product’s package becomes a vital part of establishing branding and communicating membership to a product family while maintaining individual product identity. In this paper, product packaging is investigated with a focus on the graphic packaging components that identify product families. These components include: color, shape, typography, and imagery. Through the application of tools used in facilities layout planning, graph theory, social network theory, and display design theory an approach to determine an optimal arrangement of graphic components is achieved. This approach is validated using a web based survey that tracks user-package interactions across a range of commonly used cereal boxes.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document