Product Variety Design and its Task Structuring

Abstract

This paper discusses product variety design and its task structure. Product variety design here refers to an engineering challenge for designing multiple models within a product family or across families simultaneously. This type of design problems must assess the standardization and commonalization of modules, assemblies, parts across different models, etc. The design optimization for these issues can give product performance advantages in the aspects of cost, process complexity and so forth. However, it includes various difficulties beyond ordinary design situation for a single model. Under this circumstance, this paper defines the formal representation of product variety design, and proposes a structure of design tasks involved in product variety. The analysis of typical design cases reveals several characteristics of product variety design, and identifies unique and essential tasks for simultaneously designing multiple models : correlation analysis, competing against system constraints, control variable selection, coverage distribution and combination selection. These discussions lead the formal definition of product variety optimization problems and the possibilities of computational approaches toward this direction. © 1999, The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.