Product Platform Design: A Graph Grammar Approach

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahed Siddique ◽  
David W. Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Graph Grammar ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Portfolio ◽  
Graph Grammars ◽  
The Core ◽  
Platform Development ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Platform

Abstract The current marketplace can be characterized by the need for variety, faster time to market, and decrease in cost. To survive companies are shifting from a mass production mode to mass customization to provide the necessary variety. One of the key elements of mass customization is the product platform. In this paper we will investigate the use of graph grammars to develop common platforms for a set of similar products and to specify the product portfolio supported by the platform. To facilitate development of common platforms a formal product family architecture representation is presented which separates the core and the options to facilitate the identification of the common platform. Graphs are used to represent the core for function and structure viewpoints, and grammars to specify the relationships among the core and the options. Arguments on suitability of graph grammars in common platform development, are also presented in the paper.

Shape Commonalization to Develop Common Platform for Product Family

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sagar Chowdhury ◽  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Cad Models ◽  
Platform Development ◽  
The Common ◽  
Index Value ◽  
Challenging Situation ◽  
Commonality Index ◽  
Common Platform

Current market place is highly competitive and frequently changing, to survive companies need to quickly respond to the customers’ requirements. This challenging situation demands a robust platform design and development process to produce variety of products in the shortest possible time. The common components for a set of similar products under a family can be grouped into a common platform. Development of product platform requires measuring the similarity among a set of products. This paper presents an approach to measure the similarity among a set of CAD models of products to develop a common product platform. The measured similarity of geometries can allow designers to identify components that have the potential to be included in the common platform. The degree of similarity is determined by extracting the information and developing a suitable commonality index for a set of CAD models. The commonality index values are then used to determine the common platform for a set of assembly products by developing and calculating the Average Assembly Platform index value. The overall approach is followed by two case studies: Cell Phone casing models and Vacuum Cleaner models.

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.

Development of Repeatable Interim Products Utilizing the Common Generic Block Concept

2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (04) ◽  
pp. 195-202
Author(s):  
Richard Lee Storch ◽  
Smith Sukapanpotharam
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
General Framework ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Threshold Value ◽  
Stopping Criterion ◽  
Clustering Techniques ◽  
World Class ◽  
The Common ◽  
Block Complexity ◽  
Relative Similarity

Productive shipbuilders provide customized or made-to-order products to customers. To date, most of these "world class" companies have succeeded by developing a series of repeatable type blocks, which may be chosen and combined to form products that respond to customer needs. Type blocks have been developed as a result of long experience in customizing ships to specific needs, while maintaining a repeatable build strategy. These are, therefore, empirically based. This paper reports on the early stages of work to develop a theory and methodology for developing type blocks for shipyards that do not currently have them in place and/or lack the historical base from which to extract common blocks. The concept, called Common Generic Block, builds these using the principles of mass customization, a block complexity matrix, grouping using clustering techniques based on production attributes, and applying a threshold value as a stopping criterion for the clustering. This paper describes the general framework of the approach and provides details on the block complexity matrix, used for determining the relative similarity of products to be included in a product family.

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 Variation-Based Methodology for Product Family Design

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raviraj U. Nayak ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
Small Deviations ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Performance Requirements ◽  
Input Design ◽  
Design Variables ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Common

Abstract In recent years, considerable research has been directed towards the development of methods for designing families of products. In this paper, we present a Variation-Based Platform Design Methodology (VBPDM), which aims to satisfy a range of performance requirements using the smallest variation of the product designs in the family. In the first stage of the VBPDM, the common product platform around which the product family is to be developed is identified. A ranged set of solutions is found, represented by the mean and standard deviation of the input design variables, to meet a range of the different performance requirements for the product family. During this first stage, a compromise Decision Support Problem (DSP) is used to optimize the commonality goal that seeks to minimize the deviation of the input design variables, while satisfying the range of performance requirements. Those design variables that show small deviations are held constant to form the product platform. In the second stage of the VBPDM, each individual product is designed around the common platform such that the functional requirements of the product are best satisfied. As an example, the proposed method is used to develop a family of universal electric motors designed to meet a range of torque requirements. The results are compared against previous work.

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
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Matrix Analysis ◽  
Structure Modeling ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Single Product ◽  
Design Processes ◽  
Structure Matrix ◽  
Implement Strategy

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.

Self-configuring components approach to product variant development

2004 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHELE GERMANI ◽  
FERRUCCIO MANDORLI
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Theoretical Aspect ◽  
New Product ◽  
Consumer Electronics ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
Definition Of

The use of modularity in the design of a new product or the adoption of a product platform, as the base to define new solutions within a product family, offers the company a chance to meet diverse customer needs at low cost because of economies of scale in all phases of the product's life cycle. At present, the concept of modularity in product design is becoming widely used in many industries such as automobiles and consumer electronics. However, if modularity and mass customization have attracted the interest of industries and researchers, the greatest efforts have been focused on the theoretical aspect whereas the related design support technologies have been only partially implemented. In this context, our intent is to develop highly reusable models, which are able to reconfigure themselves on the basis of new functional requirements. The proposed approach is based on the definition of what we callself-configuring componentsandmultiple-level functions. To describe the approach, a practical example related to the design of modules for woodworking machines is reported.

The Role of Platform Architecture Characteristics in Flexible Decision-Making

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (08) ◽  
pp. 1950061 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haluk Yoeruer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Time Delay ◽  
Development Strategy ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Development Project ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Platform Architecture ◽  
Platform Development

The platform-based product development strategy is well-known as an efficient development methodology for high variety products in many industries. The development of a physical platform prior to the development of platform-based products receives more and more importance in industrial practice and academic research. Through the upstream development of the product platform there can be a significant time delay between the planning of a platform and the development of the final platform-based product. This time delay is even more reinforced by the fact that product platforms have a longer usage time than a single product. During this time, market dynamics can negatively affect the decisions which are made in the upstream product platform development project. Flexible decision-making within platform development projects will be therefore a key challenge to develop a successful product platform in a dynamic market environment. The influence of the different platform architecture characteristics, being one of the most crucial decisions within a platform project, is evaluated in this paper, regarding flexible decision-making. In total, five key characteristics of platform architectures are identified from literature and described. The “degree of module and component reuse” which specifies closed and open platforms, the “degree of modularization versus integration” which specifies the main function structure of the platform, the “degree of scalability” which describes the potential for scaling main functions, the “degree of commonality” which from top-down specifies the common unchanged parts across all product variants within the product family, and “the share of platform modules developed within a platform project”. Based on the case study analysis of well-known and often cited platform development publications, this study shows that a significant number of platform development decisions are affected by the different characteristics of platform architectures, in terms of flexible decision-making. Based on the findings, this paper provides a new perspective to introduce development flexibility in platform projects by using the distinct characteristics of platform architectures which support flexible decision-making.

A Product Platform Development Method Using QFD

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaeil Park ◽  
Dongmin Shin
Keyword(s):  
Quality Function Deployment ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Lines ◽  
Development Method ◽  
Major Market ◽  
Technical Requirements ◽  
Platform Development ◽  
Product Platform Development ◽  
Common Components

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was initially developed to aid in designing a quality product by interconnecting customer needs in a market segment with technical requirements. Although it assists in improving product quality, it does not have a function to examine technical requirements across the major market segments serviced by a company’s product lines and to aid in developing product platform concepts. In this paper, we present a product platform development method using QFD that aids in developing platform concepts as well as improving the understanding of product family design. This method includes platform planning and platform concept exploration. Platform planning describes the extent to which a variety of products share common components, and platform concepts then are explored, which are the arrangement of common components. This paper uses an electric razor example to illustrate the proposed method.

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