Xuehong Du

Architecture of Product Family: Fundamentals and Methodology:

The rationale of developing product families with respect to satisfying diverse customer needs with reasonable costs, i.e., mass customization, has been well recognized in both industry and academia. Earlier research often highlights isolated and successful empirical studies with limited attempt to explore the theoretical foundations surrounding this economically important class of engineering design problem. This paper investigates the fundamental issues underlying product family development. The concept of Architecture of Product Family (APF) is introduced as a conceptual structure and overall logical organization of generating a family of products. APF constructs, including common bases, differentiation enablers, and configuration mechanisms, are discussed from both sales and engineering perspectives. Also discussed are variety generation methods with regard to producing custom products based on the modular product architecture and configure-to-order product development. To support APF-based product family design, a Generic Product Structure (GPS) is proposed as the platform for tailoring products to individual customer needs and generating product variants. A case study of an industrial example is also presented to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed methodology.

Design by Customers for Mass Customization Products

Abstract Producing what customers need with near mass production efficiency, or Mass Customization, has become a major trend in industry. Effective definition of customer requirements is a pre-requisite for realizing mass customization. We propose “Design by Customers” as an approach for companies to communicate to customers about what the company can offer, to find out customer needs, to assist customers in making choices and to negotiate for agreements. In this paper, the design and manufacturing capabilities of a company are represented in a Product Family Architecture. Adaptive Conjoint Analysis is then applied to help customers assert their needs, define variations from base products, visualize their options and assess alternatives.

Identifying customer need patterns for customization and personalization

The importance of incorporating customer preferences into product specifications for successful customized product design has been well recognized. An approach based on the identification of customer need patterns is proposed in this paper for better understanding of customer preferences and accordingly to enhance the product definition for customization and personalization. A tree‐structured classification algorithm is formulated for the identification of customer need patterns. Accordingly, a two‐phase methodology is developed for effective product definition. A case study of power supply products is reported to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed approach.

Graph Grammar Based Product Family Modeling

Many industries are shifting from mass production to mass customization, which demands quick response to the needs of individual customers with high quality and low costs. The development of product families has received an increasing interest in recent years because, by sharing components across products, a family of products can be derived to cater variety while maintaining the economy of scale. Aiming at the computerization, and eventual automation, of product family design, this paper tackles the formal representation issue surrounding this economically important class of engineering design problem. Breaking free from conventional understanding of product families, which is limited as shared components, the paper defines a product family as a structured system to create variety of products with shared core product technologies. It not only involves the shared base product, but also encompasses customization modules, standard designs, and primary patterns of variety to generate custom designs. The paper introduces graph grammar formalisms to the modeling of such a product family. Based on Programmed Attributed Graph Grammars (PAGG), the graph language is developed to specify the design space of the product family. The process of customizing the base product through manipulating particular modules is modeled by rewriting the starting graph using a series of productions according to the control diagram. Configuration constraints are dealt with by defining application conditions for production rules. Control diagrams are constructed to capture complex relationships among modules and used to control the application sequence of production rules. A case study of power supplies is presented to demonstrate the potential of the graph grammar based modeling approach.

Architecture of product family for mass customization

The rationale of developing product families with respect to mass customization has been well recognized in both industry and academia. This paper investigates the concept of architecture of product family (APF). Fundamental issues underlying the APF are discussed. Common bases, differentiation enablers and configuration mechanisms from both sales and engineering views are defined. Variety generation methods with regard to producing custom products based on the modular product architecture are introduced. To represent a family of products instead of a collection of individual products, a general product structure (GPS) is proposed. Accordingly, family based product design is studied. The APF and the associated GPS capture both compositional and generative aspects of product family design, thus providing the constructs for generating product variants automatically.

Product family modeling and design support: An approach based on graph rewriting systems

Earlier research on product family design (PFD) often highlights isolated and successful empirical studies with a limited attempt to explore the modeling and design support issues surrounding this economically important class of engineering design problems. This paper proposes a graph rewriting system to organize product family data according to the underpinning logic and to model product derivation mechanisms for PFD. It represents the structural and behavioral aspects of product families as family graphs and related graph operations, respectively. The derivation of product variants becomes a graph rewriting process, in which family graphs are transformed to variant graphs by applying appropriate graph rewriting rules. The system is developed in the language of programmed graph rewriting systems or PROGRES, which supports the specification of hierarchical graph schema and parametric rewriting rules. A meta model is defined for family graphs to factor out those entities common to all product families. A generic model is defined to describe all specific entities relevant to particular families. An instance model describes all product variants for individual customer orders. A prototype of a graph-based PFD system for office chairs is also developed. The system can provide an interactive environment for customers to make choices among product offerings. It also facilitates design automation of product families and enhances interactions and negotiations among sales, design, and manufacturing.

Modelling platform-based product configuration using programmed attributed graph grammars

The rationale of platform-based product configuration has been well recognized for the implementation of mass customization. A product platform refers to the conceptual structure and logical organization of product families from both customer and technical viewpoints. This provides a generic umbrella under which product configuration manifests itself through variant derivation within common product line structures. Earlier research often highlights successful yet isolated empirical studies without attempt to discuss the more general modelling issue surrounding this economically important class of engineering design problems. This paper introduces graph grammar formalisms to the representation of a product platform and the modelling of variant derivation. The concepts of multi-pointed hyper-graph, node nesting and graph class are developed for modelling platform modules, multilevel variety origins and generic product instantiation, respectively. A programmed attributed graph grammar is used to transform customer requirements in the customer view to product family design in the technical view. Mapping relationships from the customer view to the technical view are represented in the form of production rules for graph transformation. The application conditions of productions in cooperation with control diagrams determine how a suitable variant can be derived from the base product of the platform. A case study of power supply platform modelling is also reported.

Product Families for Mass Customization

The rationale of developing product families with respect to satisfying diverse customer needs with reasonable costs, i.e., mass customization, has been well recognized in both industry and academia. Earlier research often highlights isolated and successful empirical studies with limited attempt to explore the theoretical foundations surrounding this economically important class of engineering design problem. In this chapter we investigate the fundamental issues underlying product family development. The concept of Architecture of Product Family (APF) is introduced as a conceptual structure and overall logical organization of generating a family of products. APF constructs — including common bases, differentiation enablers, and configuration mechanisms — are discussed from both a sales and an engineering perspective. Further, variety generation methods are evaluated in regard to producing custom products based on the modular product architecture and configure-to-order product development. To support APF-based product family design, a Generic Product Structure (GPS) is proposed as the platform for tailoring products to individual customer needs and generating product variants. At the end of the chapter, we present a case study of an industrial example to illustrate the feasibility and potential of our proposed framework.

Product definition for effective customer order processing: a customer-oriented approach

Product definition in custom order processing is a set of mappings translating individual customer needs into product design specifications. As an attempt to address the problems of product definition, a customer-oriented approach is proposed in this paper to capture individual customer requirements precisely and rapidly in order to specify custom product.