A platform design methodology for customized family of products

Abstract

In today’s market, products must meet or exceed customers’ needs while still being competitively priced and developed in the shortest time possible. Product family design and platform-based product development seeks to be the solution to that problem.

Product family design and platform-based product development has received much attention over the last decade. Product family design and platform-based product development have been well recognized as an effective means to achieve mass customization. Investing into product families which build on platforms and shared modules, installs flexibility for a company to accommodate future customization requirements.

In product family design, determining an effective design strategy or commonality for a platform can be considered as a multidisciplinary optimization problem with respect to design variables, production cost, company’s revenue, and customers’ satisfaction. In this paper, we investigate strategic module-based platform design to identify an optimal platform strategy in a product family. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we use a case study involving a family of sailing yachts. The limitations of the approach and future work are also discussed.