Fundamentals of product family architecture

With a highly fragmented market and increased competition, platform-based product family design is recognised as an effective method for constructing a product line that satisfies diverse customer demand while keeping design and production cost-and time-effective. Recognising the need for modularity and commonality in platform development, this paper presents a systematic framework to assist in implementing top-down platform and product family design, which aims to achieve system-level modularity for variety generation, and rationalise the commonality configuration for module instantiation. In the first phase of platform development, a robust and flexible product family architecture is constructed to accommodate variations by analysing the external varieties of the generic product architecture, and provide a modularity design space, wherein the design tasks are further decomposed into module instantiation. The second phase of detailed platform development aims to enhance commonality in terms of engineering efficiency by coordinating with the backend product realisation stage. A tractable optimisation method is used to capture and resolve the trade-off between commonality configuration and individual product performance. A family of power tool designs is used to demonstrate the potential and feasibility of the proposed framework at the system level and detailed design stages.

Section: Modularity and Commonality For Proactive Platform Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modularity analysis and commonality design: a framework for the top-down platform and product family design

Liang

Wong

Lee

2009

“…(1) Industrial production is evolving towards models that more adequately address an epochal shift from mass production to customised production or mass customisation which emphasises non-material aspects (e.g., intellectual property, brand, aesthetic design and so on) and highly personalised needs (Pine 1993, Jiao and Tseng 2000, Jiao et al 2003. Besides, patterns of consumption and production are 6864 P.P.…”

Section: Birth Of Pssmentioning

confidence: 99%

Status review and research strategies on product-service systems

Wang

Ming

et al. 2011

As present trends in economic and population growth continue, the natural environment is increasingly being stressed. More and more researchers, institutes and programmes have paid attention to product-service systems (PSSes) in the last decade because PSS integrates tangible artefact and intangible service to achieve sustainability, improve enterprise competitiveness, and meet customer needs better. In order to respond to the industrial trend towards PSS and frame the related research, the state-of-the-art of PSS research and development are reported. Furthermore, in order to integrate fragmental PSS solutions, this paper proposes a framework for product-service lifecycle management (PSLM) and technologies of PSS development. So, four categories are focused on: review of PSS, research about PSS development, a framework for PSLM, and technologies for PSLM (modular product-service development and ontology-based productservice knowledge expression and reuse). The preliminary solution of the implementation roadmap and technologies for PSLM which need to be perfected is proposed to lay a basis for further development and application of PSS for the benefit of industries.

“…A PF architecture (PFA) is the logic organization of a PF (Jiao and Tseng 2000) that has encompassed all the configuration knowledge needed in product customization and acts as an integration platform for traditional product design, sales and marketing, and distribution and services. A good PFA can characterize customer needs and segmented markets, provide a generic architecture for a large PF, and capture the commonality of a PF to facilitate reuse of design knowledge, increase of product variety, management and maintenance of the PF, etc.…”

Section: Configuration Knowledge Of a Product Familymentioning

confidence: 99%

Web-based configuration design system for product customization

Ong

Lin

Nee

2006

In mass customization, web-centric knowledge-based configuration systems have become an important tool to help customers configure products that satisfy their different needs and the complex configuration constraints of a product family (PF). An effective knowledge representation scheme and the associated reasoning mechanisms are essential for the success of these systems. This paper presents an object-oriented approach that integrates the functional and structural models of a PF with design process knowledge. Invasion-based search algorithms are proposed to deal with different situations in product customization and heuristic knowledge is introduced in these algorithms to improve the search efficiency. Optimization models have been constructed in terms of customers' preferences to provide them with the highest satisfaction in product customization. Based on the representation scheme and reasoning algorithms, a web-based configuration system prototype is developed to support product customization. An example of a bicycle family is used as a study case and described in details.