Optimal Product Family Architecture Design and Commonality Decision for Sustainability and Intellectual Property Protection

With the rapid development of new technology and the growing global competition in industry, it is essential for companies to protect their sensitive product designs and technologies. To ensure that their systems are not exploited by third-party competitors or remanufacturers, original equipment manufacturers often apply physical attributes and/or reduce commonality within a product family to prevent easy reusing and recovering. Yet, these design strategies are key barriers to the sustainable recovery and recycling of products. To address these trade-offs, this paper proposes a stepwise methodology to identify the sustainable optimal product family architecture design while protecting intellectual property on sensitive parts or modules. The developed approach notably allows the selection of suitable and sustainable candidates to share among products, taking into account the cost-benefit of commonality within the product family. As such, it can be used as a decision support tool to help product designers identify appropriate product family architecture design and find candidates that can be shared within a product family by considering both sustainability and security parameters.

The Selection Method of Parts in Product Family Evolution

In order to solute the problems of selection and improvement of parts when the product family architecture to adapt to the diverse needs, the selection method of parts in product family evolution was proposed herein. The part’s performance and the Matching degree of demand characteristics were analyzed. The parts CSM model in product family was defined and established, the clustering method based on fuzzy C-means (FCM) for parts was used in CSM coupling space of parts. Finally, the wheel loader’s manipulator product family as an example was employed to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

A Method for Part Analysis and Selection in the Renewal Process of Product Family Architecture

Aiming at selecting appropriate parts in the product family architecture for innovating, a method for part analysis and selection in the renewal process of product family architecture is initially proposed. On the basis of parts analysis from the three aspects of cost effectiveness-commonality, performance sensitivity and demand-matching degree, a coupling spatial model CSM is established. With the fuzzy c-means clustering method, the parts were clustered, and the choice domain and the improvement direction were pointed out. Finally, a case study of part analysis and selection in the working device product family of the wheel loader was presented to illustrate the validity of the method.

Study on Product Family Architecture Dynamic Evolution Based on Product Instances

Product family architecture (PFA) need to keep the dynamic evolution, in order to meet the changing needs of customers and effectively support the mass customization. This paper puts forward the theory of PFA dynamic evolution based on structure semantic unit. The variation of PFA is mainly caused by the changes in component. In the process of evolution, some components of the architecture need to be removed, replaced or added. For this purpose, the concepts of structure semantic and structure semantic unit were proposed. The structure semantic unit is the combination of assembly relationship, assembly constraint, and geometric information of related dimension and the model of components. The corresponding operations (remove, replace or add) of component is ascertained by consumption analysis of part and similarity calculation between structure semantic units.