A Review of Recent Literature in Product Family Design and Platform-Based Product Development

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhila Pirmoradi ◽  
G. Gary Wang ◽  
Timothy W. Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Family Design

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.

Collaborative Product Development and Customization: A Platform-Based Strategy and Implementation

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuan F. Zha ◽  
Ram D. Sriram
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Mass Customization ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Data Access ◽  
Product Platform ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Collaborative Product Development ◽  
Requirements Modeling ◽  
Knowledge Intensive

Mass customization and global economic collaboration drive the product development and management beyond internal enterprise to cover the whole product value chain. This paper presents a platform-based strategy and approach for collaborative product development and customization. The implementation of this strategy takes 1) the product platform as the core, 2) the view/search engine and rule-based control as the data access and navigation mechanism, and 3) the internet-enabled web-based integration and collaboration bus as an enabler to allow participants involved in the product lifecycle to access into both internal and external enterprise resources, applications, and services. In the paper, a generic collaborative platform design and development process model is presented for product family design and mass customization. Based on this model, a module-based integrated & distributed collaborative framework for product family design and mass customization is developed with knowledge intensive support for customer or task requirements’ modeling, product architecture modeling, product platform establishment, product family generation, and product variant assessment for customization. The issues related to the high-level information & knowledge modeling and the development of knowledge-intensive collaborative support framework are addressed. Finally, a case study for collaborative design of families of modular robotic systems is given.

scholarly journals A Framework for Life Cycle Cost Estimation of a Product Family at the Early Stage of Product Development

2012 ◽  
Vol 605-607 ◽  
pp. 222-227
Author(s):  
Jaya Suteja The ◽  
Prasad K.D.V. Yarlagadda ◽  
M. Azharul Karim ◽  
Cheng Yan
Keyword(s):  
Life Cycle ◽  
Product Development ◽  
Cost Estimation ◽  
Life Cycle Cost ◽  
Product Life Cycle ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Estimation Method ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
The Cost

A cost estimation method is required to estimate the life cycle cost of a product family at the early stage of product development in order to evaluate the product family design. There are difficulties with existing cost estimation techniques in estimating the life cycle cost for a product family at the early stage of product development. This paper proposes a framework that combines a knowledge based system and an activity based costing techniques in estimating the life cycle cost of a product family at the early stage of product development. The inputs of the framework are the product family structure and its sub function. The output of the framework is the life cycle cost of a product family that consists of all costs at each product family level and the costs of each product life cycle stage. The proposed framework provides a life cycle cost estimation tool for a product family at the early stage of product development using high level information as its input. The framework makes it possible to estimate the life cycle cost of various product family that use any types of product structure. It provides detailed information related to the activity and resource costs of both parts and products that can assist the designer in analyzing the cost of the product family design. In addition, it can reduce the required amount of information and time to construct the cost estimation system.

A design contribution to the entrepreneurial experience

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan David ROLDAN ACEVEDO ◽  
Ida TELALBASIC
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Design Research ◽  
Recent Literature ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Entrepreneurial Activity ◽  
Value Proposition ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
User Centric ◽  
Constant Growth

In recent history, different design approaches have been entering fields like management and strategy to improve product development and service delivery. Specifically, entrepreneurship has adopted a user-centric mindset in methodologies like the business canvas model and the value proposition canvas which increases the awareness of the users’ needs when developing solutions. What happens when a service design approach is used to understand the entrepreneurs’ experience through the creation of their startups? Recent literature suggests that entrepreneurial activity and success is conditioned by their local entrepreneurship ecosystem. This study investigates the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem of Medellín, Colombia - an ecosystem in constant growth but that lacks qualitative analysis. The sample consists of 12 entrepreneurs in early-stage phase. The data was gathered with two design research methods: Cultural Probes and Semi-structured interviews. The analysis of the information collected facilitated the development of 4 insights about the entrepreneurs and an experience map to visualise and interpret their journey to create a startup. The results of this study reflected the implications of the ecosystem, the explanation of the users’ perceptions and awareness and propose a set of ideas to the local government to improve the experience of undertaking a startup in Medellín.

A Market-Based Design Strategy for a Universal Product Family

2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seung Ki Moon ◽  
Daniel A. McAdams
Keyword(s):  
Mass Customization ◽  
Universal Design ◽  
Product Family ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Differentiated Products ◽  
Product Family Design ◽  
Design Strategies ◽  
Market Segments ◽  
Light Duty

Companies that generate a variety of products and services are creating, and increasing research on, mass-customized products in order to satisfy customers’ specific needs. Currently, the majority of effort is focused on consumers who are without disabilities. The research presented here is motivated by the need to provide a basis of product design methods for users with some disability—often called universal design (UD). Product family design is a way to achieve cost-effective mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products serving distinct market segments to be developed from a common platform. By extending concepts from product family design and mass customization to universal design, we propose a method for developing and evaluating a universal product family within uncertain market environments. We will model design strategies for a universal product family as a market economy where product family platform configurations are generated through market segments based on a product platform and customers’ preferences. A coalitional game is employed to evaluate which design strategies provide more benefit when included in the platform based on the marginal profit contribution of each strategy. To demonstrate an implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of light-duty trucks.

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