No abstract

Manufacturing firms use product families to provide variety while maintaining economies of scale to improve manufacturing productivity. Designing a successful product family requires consideration of both customer preferences and the competition. This paper presents a design for market systems approach to product family design and solves the problem of designing a product family when the competition is simultaneously designing its product family. In particular, the problem is formulated as a two-player zero-sum game. Our analysis of this problem shows that it can be separated into multiple subproblems whose solution provides an optimal solution to the original problem. The paper presents an example to illustrate the approach.