The objective in product platform design is to synthesize a set of components that will be shared by a number of product variants considering potential sacrifices in individual product performance that result from parts sharing. A good platform strategy should allow us to specify different levels of commonality for the various features and components of the product family in order to reduce the impact of commonality on performance. In this paper, we formulate the design of platforms for customizable products as a problem of optimization of access in a geometric space. This approach allows us to develop systematically hierarchic product platforms with multiple levels of commonality. We illustrate the proposed approach with a case example: the design of a product platform for a line of customizable electric motors.
The effectiveness of manufacturing enterprises that compete with product families can be leveraged through an appropriate standardization of components. In this paper we examine how a robust standardization of components can be implemented in the early stages of design with an explicit evaluation of the production system. The approach is based on (1) a mathematical formulation of design decisions using the Compromise Decision Support Problem (DSP), which includes robustness considerations, and (2) modeling production systems as networks of response surfaces. This modeling method facilitates evaluation of the impact of product design changes on the performance of the production system, thus enabling concurrent product-process design exploration. We demonstrate the approach with a case study, namely, the design of an absorber-evaporator module for a family of absorption chillers.
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