Platform Investment Decisions in Product Family Design

Author(s):  
Nicolas A. Zacharias ◽  
Ali A. Yassine

The paper proposes an intermediate modeling ground that bridges the gap between engineering design models and marketing models for the development of platform-based product families. In this model, each variant in the product family is assumed to contribute a percentage to the overall market coverage inside a target market segment and we wish to maximize this coverage subject to an available development budget. Following the conceptual engineering design phase of the product family, this model will optimize the initial investment in the platform, the commonality level between variants, and the number of variants to be produced in order to maximize market coverage. An application of the model using a Drill product family is included to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed model.

Author(s):  
Yiyang Zhang ◽  
Jianxin Jiao

To compete in the marketplace, manufacturers have been seeking for expansion of their product lines by providing product families. Product family positioning aims at planning the appropriate products to be provided to the target market segments. Due to the involved complexity such as diverse customer preferences, engineering costs, competition among similar products, etc, positioning the product family is very difficult. This paper proposes a shared surplus model for product family positioning. A comprehensive methodology for product family positioning is developed. An application of the proposed methodology for the notebook computer family positioning is reported.


Author(s):  
Olivier L. de Weck ◽  
Eun Suk Suh ◽  
David Chang

In this paper, a methodology is presented to determine the optimum number of product platforms to maximize overall product family profit with simplifying assumptions. This methodology is attempting to aid various manufacturing industries who are seeking ways to reduce product family manufacturing costs and development times through implementation of platform strategies. The methodology is based on a target market segment analysis, market leader’s performance vs. price position, and a two-level optimization approach for platform and variant designs. The proposed methodology is demonstrated for a hypothetical automotive vehicle family that attempts to serve seven different vehicle market segments. It is found that the use of three distinct platforms maximizes overall profit by pursuing primarily a horizontal leveraging strategy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 241
Author(s):  
Juliane Kuhl ◽  
Andreas Ding ◽  
Ngoc Tuan Ngo ◽  
Andres Braschkat ◽  
Jens Fiehler ◽  
...  

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.


Author(s):  
Julian R. Eichhoff ◽  
Felix Baumann ◽  
Dieter Roller

In this paper we demonstrate and compare two complementary approaches to the automatic generation of production rules from a set of given graphs representing sample designs. The first approach generates a complete rule set from scratch by means of frequent subgraph discovery. Whereas the second approach is intended to learn additional rules that fit an existing, yet incomplete, rule set using genetic programming. Both approaches have been developed and tested in the context of an application for automated conceptual engineering design, more specifically functional decomposition. They can be considered feasible, complementary approaches to the automatic inference of graph rewriting rules for conceptual design applications.


2017 ◽  
Vol 823 ◽  
pp. 012041
Author(s):  
Prabal Biswas ◽  
Prosenjit Santra ◽  
Kirit Vasava ◽  
Snehal Jayswal ◽  
Tejas Parekh ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Julian Redeker ◽  
Philipp Gebhardt ◽  
Thomas Vietor

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.


Author(s):  
Kwansuk Oh ◽  
Jong Wook Lim ◽  
Seongwon Cho ◽  
Junyeol Ryu ◽  
Yoo S. Hong

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.


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.


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