Effective Product Family Design Using Preference Aggregation

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihuang Dai ◽  
Michael J. Scott
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Preference Aggregation ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Effective Product

Effective Product Family Design Using Physical Programming

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Achille Messac ◽  
Michael P. Martinez ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Physical Programming ◽  
Effective Product

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.

Effective Product Family Design Using Physical Programming and the Product Platform Concept Exploration Method

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Achille Messac ◽  
Michael P. Martinez ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Customer Requirements ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Physical Programming ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Concept Exploration ◽  
Effective Product ◽  
Performance Gains

Abstract In an effort to produce more variety for today’s highly competitive market, companies are designing and developing families of products — groups of related products derived from common product platforms — to simultaneously satisfy multiple customer requirements. After reviewing the state of the art in product family and product platform design, we describe the Product Platform Concept Exploration Method (PPCEM) for designing common product platforms that can be scaled or “stretched” into a suitable family of products. This paper extends previous work by the authors through the novel integration of physical programming within the PPCEM to enable the product family design problem to be formulated using physically meaningful terms and preferences. The design of a family of universal electric motors is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Performance gains are achieved in the motor family by utilizing physical programming within the PPCEM when compared to previous results.

A Market-Based Design Strategy for a Universal Product Family

2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seung Ki Moon ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
Universal Design ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Differentiated Products ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Market Segments ◽  
Light Duty

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document