Product Family Member and Platform Identification with Concurrent Variable and Objective Space Smart Pareto Filtering

Abstract

Product families are frequently used to provide consumers with a variety of appealing products and to help maintain reasonably low production costs for manufacturers. Three common objectives in the design of product families are used to balance the interests of both consumers and manufacturers. These objectives are to maximize product (i) performance, (ii) distinctiveness as perceived by the consumer, and (iii) commonality as perceived by the manufacturer. To accomplish these objectives, two general approaches to product family design are frequently implemented: scale-based and module-based design. Important to both of these design approaches is the selection of product family members and the identication of common features that can be shared by family members. In this paper, a Pareto lter that concurrently considers both objective and variable spaces is used to identify a product family where each product in the family possesses optimal and distinct performance characteristics. Simultaneously, the lter also identies features that can be shared by the products in the family. The