Product platform design and customization: Status and promise

Abstract

In an effort to improve customization for today's highly competitive global marketplace, many companies are utilizing product families and platform-based product development to increase variety, shorten lead times, and reduce costs. The key to a successful product family is the product platform from which it is derived either by adding, removing, or substituting one or more modules to the platform or by scaling the platform in one or more dimensions to target specific market niches. This nascent field of engineering design has matured rapidly in the past decade, and this paper provides a comprehensive review of the flurry of research activity that has occurred during that time to facilitate product family design and platform-based product development for mass customization. Techniques for identifying platform leveraging strategies within a product family are reviewed along with metrics for assessing the effectiveness of product platforms and product families. Special emphasis is placed on optimization approaches and artificial intelligence techniques to assist in the process of product family design and platform-based product development. Web-based systems for product platform customization are also discussed. Examples from both industry and academia are presented throughout the paper to highlight the benefits of product families and product platforms. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential areas of research to help bridge the gap between planning and managing families of products and designing and manufacturing them.

Introducing Design Descriptions on Different Levels of Concretisation in a Platform Definition

“…Another trade-off is the one between increased development efforts for the initial platform and the uncertainty whether the right platform is chosen in order to develop a sufficient number of derivatives to gain back the extra expenses [12]. Platforms are generally described to be of one of either two kinds: Module based (discrete) or scale based (parametric) [5]. Cooper [13] suggests that one deliverable from TD can be a technology platform, this is further investigated by Högman [14].…”

“…Simpson [5] proposes product families as a main enabler and describes two basic approaches for the design of product families in order to achieve efficient customisation, top down and bottom up. Hansen [6] divides specification processes into four levels in the following way: (1) Engineerto-order, (2) Modify-to-order, (3) Configure-to-order and (4) Select variant.…”

Product Family Configuration Price Prediction Based On Neural Network

“…Accurately estimate the price of some configuration design in the shortest possible time is a crucial link in the process of mass customization to effectively respond to customer enquiry and win customers' orders [1] . Based on the databases such as product data management system and customer relationship management system, mining the relationship between history product variant configuration scheme and the corresponding price is an effective way to quickly and accurately predict the configuration price for some random customization order.…”

A multi-principle module identification method for product platform design

“…In today's highly competitive global business environment, platform-based strategy has been proven to be beneficial for enterprises to reduce cost, increase product variety, decrease product lead time, cope with the emerging customized requirements, and improve manufacturing flexibility (Simpson, 2004). There are two basic types of platforms, namely, the module-based platform and the scale-based platform.…”