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.

scholarly journals Product platform design and customization: Status and promise

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
TIMOTHY W. SIMPSON
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Lead Times ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Global Marketplace ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Product Platforms

In an effort to improve customization for today's highly competitive global marketplace, many companies are utilizing product families and platform-based product development to increase variety, shorten lead times, and reduce costs. The key to a successful product family is the product platform from which it is derived either by adding, removing, or substituting one or more modules to the platform or by scaling the platform in one or more dimensions to target specific market niches. This nascent field of engineering design has matured rapidly in the past decade, and this paper provides a comprehensive review of the flurry of research activity that has occurred during that time to facilitate product family design and platform-based product development for mass customization. Techniques for identifying platform leveraging strategies within a product family are reviewed along with metrics for assessing the effectiveness of product platforms and product families. Special emphasis is placed on optimization approaches and artificial intelligence techniques to assist in the process of product family design and platform-based product development. Web-based systems for product platform customization are also discussed. Examples from both industry and academia are presented throughout the paper to highlight the benefits of product families and product platforms. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential areas of research to help bridge the gap between planning and managing families of products and designing and manufacturing them.

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.

Strategic Decisions in the Early Stages of Product Family Design

2001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. A. Maier ◽  
Georges M. Fadel
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Strategic Decisions ◽  
Product Introduction ◽  
Single Product ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Formal Design

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.

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.

A Framework for Ontology-Based Heterogeneous Data Integration for Cost Management in Product Family Design

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaomeng Chang ◽  
Janis Terpenny
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Heterogeneous Data ◽  
Schema Integration ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Related Factors ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Heterogeneous Data Integration ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Semantic Data ◽  
Data Schema

High quality, high impact and economical products and systems are important goals for an enterprise. The usage of product families can be strategic to achieving these goals, yet defining these families can be challenging, requiring the consideration of numerous cost factors. This requires bringing together a great number of heterogeneous data sources of varying formats in a manner that allows the product development team to easily locate and reuse information in a collaborative manner across time and space. To date, our work has focused on the development and use of an Activity-Based Cost ontology (ABC ontology) to guide designers drill down to get at information for product family design. However, this ontology is built in such a way that it can only support information retrieval from the ontology and does not bring together and connect heterogeneous data resources. It does not address the problem of designers who struggle with obtaining relevant details from different departments in an enterprise. While there have been several semantic data schema integration tools for heterogeneous data resources integration, these tools cannot guide users to related information, that would lead to the root cause of the high cost. In this paper, in order to better manage cost in product family design, an ontology-based framework is put forward that builds on our prior work and combines the advantages of ABC ontology and data schema integration tools. The ontology-based framework can guide users to the proper information aspects through querying the central ontology, and give users detailed information about these aspects from heterogeneous data resources with the support of local ontologies. Ultimately, this framework will facilitate designers with better utilization of cost-related factors for product family design from a whole enterprise perspective.

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.

A Product Dissection-Based Methodology to Benchmark Product Family Design Alternatives

2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri J. Thevenot ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Savings ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Manufacturing Cost ◽  
Successful Implementation ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Potential Cost ◽  
Product Families ◽  
Product Platforms ◽  
Design Alternatives

Today’s companies are pressured to develop platform-based product families to increase variety, while keeping production costs low. Determining why a platform works, and alternatively why it does not, is an important step in the successful implementation of product families and product platforms in any industry. Internal and competitive benchmarking is essential to obtain knowledge of how successful product families are implemented, thus avoiding potential pitfalls of a poor product platform design strategy. While the two fields of product family design and benchmarking have been growing rapidly lately, we have found few tools that combine the two for product family benchmarking. To address this emerging need, we introduce the product family benchmarking method (PFbenchmark) to assess product family design alternatives (PFDAs) based on commonality/variety tradeoff and cost analysis. The proposed method is based on product family dissection, and utilizes the Comprehensive Metric for Commonality developed in previous work to assess the level of commonality and variety in each PFDA, as well as the corresponding manufacturing cost. The method compares not only (1) existing PFDAs but also (2) the potential cost savings and commonality/variety improvement after redesign using two plots—the commonality/variety plot and the cost plot—enabling more effective comparisons across PFDAs. An example of benchmarking of two families of valves is presented to demonstrate the proposed method.

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.

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