A Market-Based Design Strategy for a Universal Product Family

Abstract

Companies that generate a variety of products and services are creating, and increasing research on, mass-customized products in order to satisfy customers’ specific needs. Currently, the majority of effort is focused on consumers who are without disabilities. The research presented here is motivated by the need to provide a basis of product design methods for users with some disability—often called universal design (UD). Product family design is a way to achieve cost-effective mass customization by allowing highly differentiated products serving distinct market segments to be developed from a common platform. By extending concepts from product family design and mass customization to universal design, we propose a method for developing and evaluating a universal product family within uncertain market environments. We will model design strategies for a universal product family as a market economy where product family platform configurations are generated through market segments based on a product platform and customers’ preferences. A coalitional game is employed to evaluate which design strategies provide more benefit when included in the platform based on the marginal profit contribution of each strategy. To demonstrate an implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of light-duty trucks.

Disability Distribution Modeling for Universal Product Design

“…Previously, modeling techniques have been applied to the design of universal products. The design of universal kitchen products was evaluated by modeling market environments as a Bayesian game (Moon & McAdams, 2012) and a real-options based approach to compare the expected worth of devices modified from the same product family (Moon & McAdams, 2010).…”

Selecting Occupational Safety Equipment by MCDM Approach Considering Universal Design Principles

“…When the extant literature on the UD principles is analyzed, it can be seen that they are mostly used in studies related to home or living place design (Gao, Ebert, Chen, & Ding, ; Hwangbo, Kim, Kim, & Ji, ; Kitano & Adachi, ; Rousek & Hallbeck, ), education and learning issues (Brizee, Sousa, & Driscoll, ; Fox, ; Larkins, Dunning, & Ridout, ), special design (Bendixen & Benktzon, ; C. C. H. Chan, Wong, Lee, & Chi, ; Endo & Kawamura, ; Imai et al., 2009; Kose, ; Moon & McAdams, ; Mustaquim, ; Newell, Gregor, Morgan, Pullin, & Macaulay, ; Pieper & Hermsdorf, ; Watanabe, Okano, Asano, & Ogawa, ), or health subjects (Afacan & Demirkan, ; Huang, Tao, Pu, Ren, & Qu, ; Plos, Buisine, Aoussat, Mantelet, & Dumas, ; Sadamoto, Hikota, & Saeki, ; Sangelkar & McAdams, ) for elderly or/and disabled people. Although UD is a concept that is defined for all kinds of design in all kinds of subjects, this literature review shows that it is commonly employed for special design cases for a specific part of the population.…”

Linear programming embedded genetic algorithm for product family design optimization with maximizing imprecise part-worth utility function

“…Kumar et al (2009) proposed a four-step market-driven product family design approach, and market profit was modeled as the objective function in the optimization step, which is similar to optimization objective of this research. Moon and McAdams (2012) proposed a market-based design approach for universal product family, in which coalitional game theory was applied to model the platform selection problem, and utilities were used to drive the value of universal design to large customer populations.…”