A platform design methodology for customized family of products

• Main Author: Ang, Jonathan Wei Juin
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Industrial engineering::Engineering management; DRNTU::Engineering::Industrial engineering::Human factors engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/55110
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In today’s market, products must meet or exceed customers’ needs while still being competitively priced and developed in the shortest time possible. Product family design and platform-based product development seeks to be the solution to that problem. Product family design and platform-based product development has received much attention over the last decade. Product family design and platform-based product development have been well recognized as an effective means to achieve mass customization. Investing into product families which build on platforms and shared modules, installs flexibility for a company to accommodate future customization requirements. In product family design, determining an effective design strategy or commonality for a platform can be considered as a multidisciplinary optimization problem with respect to design variables, production cost, company’s revenue, and customers’ satisfaction. In this paper, we investigate strategic module-based platform design to identify an optimal platform strategy in a product family. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we use a case study involving a family of sailing yachts. The limitations of the approach and future work are also discussed.