A Method to Design Common Product Platform Based on Structure Matrix Analysis

2011 ◽  
Vol 130-134 ◽  
pp. 2340-2344
Author(s):  
Bin Zhu ◽  
Hong Li

Design for product family is an efficient way to guarantee the idea of mass customization to be implemented successfully. This paper presents an approach to architecting a product family that aims to provide methodological guidance for enterprises which plan to implement strategy of product family design. Based on the conventional methodology of designing for a single product, this paper respectively demonstrates the methods of requirement modeling, function-principle modeling and structure modeling in details according to the characteristics of product family design, and also some key approaches in different design processes are presented.

Author(s):  
Xuan F. Zha ◽  
Ram D. Sriram

Mass customization and global economic collaboration drive the product development and management beyond internal enterprise to cover the whole product value chain. This paper presents a platform-based strategy and approach for collaborative product development and customization. The implementation of this strategy takes 1) the product platform as the core, 2) the view/search engine and rule-based control as the data access and navigation mechanism, and 3) the internet-enabled web-based integration and collaboration bus as an enabler to allow participants involved in the product lifecycle to access into both internal and external enterprise resources, applications, and services. In the paper, a generic collaborative platform design and development process model is presented for product family design and mass customization. Based on this model, a module-based integrated & distributed collaborative framework for product family design and mass customization is developed with knowledge intensive support for customer or task requirements’ modeling, product architecture modeling, product platform establishment, product family generation, and product variant assessment for customization. The issues related to the high-level information & knowledge modeling and the development of knowledge-intensive collaborative support framework are addressed. Finally, a case study for collaborative design of families of modular robotic systems is given.


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):  
Johan O¨lvander ◽  
Xiaolong Feng ◽  
Bo Holmgren

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.


Author(s):  
Amar Pandit ◽  
Zahed Siddique

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.


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.


2013 ◽  
Vol 475-476 ◽  
pp. 1402-1405
Author(s):  
Xian Fu Cheng ◽  
Qi Hang Zhu

A new design method for product family was presented based on adaptable product platform. Firstly, customer demands were analyzed for bridge crane. Secondly, axiomatic design was utilized as framework to zigzaging mapping between functional requirements and design parameters, and design matrix was established. Then the sensitivity analysis among design parameters and between design parameters and functional requirements was done. The design relation matrix was established and relation degree among design parameters was calculated. Based on above analysis, the platform parameters were identified.


2012 ◽  
Vol 452-453 ◽  
pp. 516-520
Author(s):  
Yan Ling Cai ◽  
Zhen Hua Cui

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.


Author(s):  
Seung Ki Moon ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams

Innovative companies that generate a variety of products and services for satisfying customers’ specific needs are invoking and increasing research on mass-customized products, but the majority of their efforts are still focused on general consumers who are without disabilities. This research is motivated by the need to provide a basis of universal design guidelines and methods, primarily because of a lack of knowledge on disabilities in product design as well as methods for designing and evaluating products for everyone. Product family design is a way to achieve cost-effective mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products to be developed from a common platform while targeting products to distinct market segments. By extending concepts from product family design and mass customization to universal design, we propose a method for developing a universal product family to generate economical feasible design concepts and evaluating design feasibility with respect to disabilities within dynamic market environments. We will model design strategies for a universal product family as a market economy where functional module configurations are generated through market segments based on a product platform. A coalitional game is employed to model module sharing situations regarding dynamic market environments and decides which functional modules provide more benefit when in the platform based on the marginal contribution of each module. To demonstrate implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of mobile phones.


Author(s):  
Jaeil Park ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson

Product family design involves carefully balancing the commonality of the product platform with the distinctiveness of the individual products in the family. While a variety of optimization methods have been developed to help designers determine the best design variable settings for the product platform and individual products within the family, production costs are thought to be an important criterion to choose the best platform among candidate platform designs. Thus, it is prerequisite to have an appropriate production cost model to be able to estimate the production costs incurred by having common and variant components within a product family. In this paper, we propose a production cost model based on a production cost framework associated with the manufacturing activities. The production cost model can be easily integrated within optimization frameworks to support a Decision-Based Design approach for product family design. As an example, the production cost model is utilized to estimate the production costs of a family of cordless power screwdrivers.


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