A two-stage model of adaptable product platform for engineering-to-order configuration design

Abstract

Product platforms are used to enable mass customisation to serve a large number of different market segments. The products are configured-to-order, meaning they are compiled using a variety of pre-developed building blocks. However, the building blocks that make up a traditional platform can only serve customer requirements that are known. Engineering-to-order (ETO) development serves companies where customer requirements vary frequently. Here, designs are tailored to fit specific customer requirements upon request, an approach which is time consuming if serving a large number of different customers. This paper presents an approach for ETO configuration design. It comprises a two-stage model that enables design reuse while simultaneously maintaining flexibility to manage changes in customer requirements. The proposed artefact model is configured modularly to progress the design work and to create an architecture to work with, and scalable flexibility is maintained until the customer requirements are considered stable enough to optimise the final design. An illustrative case shows the approach's feasibility to a twostage configuration of a rear frame of a jet engine. While using overall design considerations to select modules, trade-off curves are used for final scalable configuration. A change in customer requirements is accommodated by scalable flexibility, thereby creating an adaptable product platform.

A systematic literature review of product platform design under uncertainty

“…To solve the problem that the current Configure to Order (CTO)-oriented product platform cannot effectively handle the dynamic customer requirements of Engineering to Order (ETO) products, an adaptive generic product structure (Briere-Cote et al 2010), an adaptive product platform (Levandowski, Jiao, and Johannesson 2015), and an adaptable open architecture product platform (Zheng et al 2017) are proposed. These proposed adaptable product platforms include unconfigured modules, alternative modules, and parameterized modules, which provides adaptability to meet changing requirements through the reuse of unconfigured modules, the configuration of alternative modules, and the parametric variant design of parameterized modules.…”

Configuration Equilibrium Model of Product Variant Design Driven by Customer Requirements

“…Yu et al [8] developed a joint optimization model of complex product variant design responding to customer requirement changes. Levandowski et al [9] presented a variant design approach for engineering-to-order configuration design. Vianello et al [10] focused on investigating the characteristics of engineering changes.…”

Development of product platforms: Theory and methodology

“…Scalability is represented by the parameter bandwidth describing the parameter ranges in which the solutions, CC and DS, can vary. Consequently, a platform based on CCs encompasses both a modular bandwidth and a scalable bandwidth (Levandowski et al, 2015).…”