Abstract
Nowadays, it is believed that increasing product variety could help manufacturing companies to increase sales volumes and gain more profits. An effective way that has been widely employed in industry is to implement product family strategy based on a modular architecture, with which a large number of product variants can be quickly generated using combinations of different alternative modules or components. However, it is not easy for a company to decide what product variants should be selected and produced in order to maximise profits. This is not only about marketing strategy but also tightly associated with the companies’ own uncertain manufacturing resource constraints. Therefore, in this paper, a fuzzy optimisation model is adopted for modelling the product variety selection problem based on an existing modular product family architecture while at the same time considering uncertain manufacturing resource constraints. The proposed method can help various manufacturing companies to select the best product variety under the uncertain market environment and limited manufacturing and supplying capacity. Finally, a hypothetical car’s selection is presented as an example to illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the method proposed in this paper.
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