Multicriteria Optimization in Product Platform Design

Abstract

A product platform is a set of common components, modules or parts from which a stream of derivative products can be created. Product platform design requires selection of the shared parts and assessment of the potential sacrifices in individual product performance that result from parts sharing. A multicriteria optimization problem can be formulated to study such decisions in a quantitative manner at the product performance level. Studying the Pareto sets that correspond to various derivative products leads to a systematic methodology for design decision making. Design of a nail gun platform is used to illustrate the concepts presented. �DOI: 10.1115/1.1355775�

Modularity and Commonality Research: Past Developments and Future Opportunities

“…For example, considering the structural strengths of components that can be common across products and their manufacturing costs Cetin and Saitou (2004b;2005) develop models that allow to find optimal modular designs. Similar ideas are pursued by Nelson et al (2001) and Fellini et al (2005) in their exploration of performance penalties of potentially common components.…”

Crafting Platform Strategy Based on Anticipated Benefits and Costs

“…Ulrich et al (1998) find "for low-quality segments, brand price-premium is significantly positively correlated with the quality of the lowest quality model in the product line" (Ramdas 2003). Viewed from the other perspective, Nelson et al (2001) describes how overdesigning lower level variants can place acquisition and maintenance costs above the reach of some customers, thus decreasing expected platform volume and profitability.…”

The Power of Integrality: Linkages between Product Architecture, Innovation, and Industry Structure

“…For example, some scholars use indirect measures, i.e., they assess the degree of product modularity indirectly by asking managers to estimate the degree to which certain consequences that are often associated with modularity -for example, the degree to which a buyer can customize a product, or the degree to which a manufacturing process allows late configuration -are more or less true for their own products (Duray, Ward, Milligan and Berry 2000;Worren, Moore and Cardona 2002;Tu, Vonderembse, Ragu-Nathan and Ragu-Nathan 2004). Others, particularly in the engineering literature, have developed numerous approaches to measure product architecture characteristics such as modularity, commonality, and platforms directly on the product (Nelson, Parkinson and Papalambros 2001;Fujita and Yoshida 2004;Simpson and D'Souza 2004). The majority of these latter approaches takes a product architecture in its overall structure as a given, and then searches for the optimal solution in the configuration space.…”