An assessment of methods to support the design of future robust modular product architectures

Abstract

Modular product architectures enable not only a trade-off between the external variety demanded by the customer and the cost-causing internal variety, but also facilitate the ability to react on future requirement changes with less effort. This work concentrates on the investigation of design support, which address both objectives at once. For this purpose relevant criteria for a successful design of the so called future robust modular product architectures are derived and used to gain and evaluate the existing design methods. The results are used to describe the further research focus.