Product family configuration design modeling

Abstract

A critical issue facing nowadays' global manufacturing companies is to reach customers in global markets while lessening the time needed to develop new products, and reducing the costs by sharing common components across products. Developing multiple products based on product family sharing a common platform has been well recognized as a successful approach for many industries. Earlier research on product family often highlights isolated and successful empirical studies with a limited attempt to explore the theoretical foundations, modeling and design support issues surrounding this economically important class of engineering design problems. Although current research presents product family modeling by identifying feasible platform configurations and reducing spaces size, or build an ideal model using graph grammar methods, but it is necessary to find one way to build model and realize it easily.