Multidisciplinary domains association in product family design

Abstract

This chapter presents an innovative new model for integrating the diversity of market segments requirements with the design of product families and platforms for achieving mass customization. It is hypothesized that the relationship between product design features, product functionalities, and customer requirements domains is analogous to species co-speciation in nature. Each “Market Species” represents the needs of a market segment in the customer domain, satisfied by a group of product functionalities that are associated with a group of product components forming the corresponding “product Species” (variant) in the physical domain. Co-speciation is studied in biology using the reconciliation of cladogram trees, which result from cladistic analysis of the studied species characteristics. Cladistics is used in this work to build products platform and modules which correspond to the common regional requirements of the market. Design Structural Matrices are used to capture the relationships between the three domains, while liaison graphs help avoid infeasible combinations of product components and infer possible components integration. This model is useful in products mass customization applications, where delayed product differentiation is a prerequisite, as it allows synchronizing the differentiation points in different domains to maximize the benefit from commonality of requirements, functions, and components.