Concurrent Design of Product Families and Reconfigurable Assembly Systems

2013 ◽  
Vol 135 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
April Bryan ◽  
Hui Wang ◽  
Jeffrey Abell
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Model ◽  
Concurrent Engineering ◽  
Manufacturing Systems ◽  
Market Competition ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Concurrent Design ◽  
Sequential Approach ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Reconfigurable Assembly

To cope with the challenges of market competition and the greater purchasing power of consumers, manufacturers have increased the variety of products they offer. Product families and reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are used to produce product variety cost-effectively. However, there is a lack of concurrent engineering methods for the joint design of a product family and an RMS, since existing concurrent engineering methods were developed for a single product and its associated manufacturing system. The presence of product variety brings challenges to the concurrent engineering of a product family and its reconfigurable assembly system (RAS), as the decision space is broader. This paper introduces a mathematical model for the concurrent design of a product family and a RAS. In addition, a mathematical model for the sequential approach to product family and RAS design is introduced to compare with the results of the concurrent methodology. A genetic algorithm has been developed to solve the models introduced for both the concurrent and sequential approaches. Examples are used to demonstrate the implementation of the concurrent approach to product family and RAS design and the benefits that could be achieved by using this approach. The solutions indicate that the concurrent design of product families and RASs leads to profits that are the same as or higher than the profits obtained with the sequential design approach. Therefore, the concurrent design of product families and RAS methodology is a more cost-effective approach to designing families of products and their associated manufacturing systems.

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.

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.

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.

Global Product Family Design: A Mathematical Model for Simultaneous Decision of Module Commonalization and Supply Chain Configuration

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kikuo Fujita ◽  
Hirofumi Amaya ◽  
Ryota Akai
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Model ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Optimization Method ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Design Production ◽  
Supply Chain Configuration ◽  
The Given ◽  
Chain Configuration

Today’s manufacturing has become global at all aspects of marketing, design, production, distribution, etc. While product family design has been an essential viewpoint for meeting with the demand for product variety, its meaning is becoming more broad and complicated with linking product design with issues on market systems, supply chain, etc. This paper calls such a design situation ‘global product family design,’ and firstly characterizes its components and complexity. Following them, this paper develops a mathematical model for the simultaneous decision problem of module commonalization strategies under the given product architecture and supply chain configuration through selection of manufacturing sites for module production, assembly and final distribution as an instance of the problems. This paper demonstrates some numerical case studies for ascertaining the validity and promise of the developed mathematical model with an optimization method configured with a genetic algorithm and a simplex method. Finally, it concludes with some discussion on future works.

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.

Robust Design of Product Families for Make-to-Order Systems

1998 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel Hernandez ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson ◽  
Janet K. Allen ◽  
Eduardo Bascaran ◽  
Luis F. Avila ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Product Design ◽  
Robust Design ◽  
Manufacturing Systems ◽  
Product Variety ◽  
Market Demand ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Manufacturing Plants ◽  
Absorption Chillers ◽  
Processing Times ◽  
Make To Order

Abstract Although manufacturing plants dedicated to a single product exist, most plants today make multiple products. The pressure to compete via product variety and customization has served to increase the number of different products produced by a typical plant. The manufacturing systems of complex make-to-order families of products usually face problems associated with the high variability of processing times, supply deliveries and market demand. How can product design improve the performance of the manufacturing system of complex make-to-order products? In this paper we present a method, based on robust design principles and a multi-objective decision model embodied in the Robust Concept Exploration Method, to support concurrent decisions in the early stages of the design of make-to-order families of products. Emphasis is given to adopting standardization, modularity and robustness in product design as key principles to improve the performance of this kind of systems. The design of an absorber-evaporator module for a family of absorption chillers is used as an example to illustrate our approach.

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.

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.

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