Sustainable platform identification for product family design

Abstract

With global market competition, product family design and a platform-based strategy have received a lot of attention for providing sufficient variety of products in an economical way. Most previous research for the product family design has focused on its economic benefits by sharing common platform for manufacturing phase. Since awareness of environmental concerns is growing at an ever-increasing rate, environmental regulations are becoming more stringent, which in turn pushes designers to consider extra features in product family design, for example, sustainability. In order to consider the sustainability in the product family design, the platform strategy for manufacturing should be redesigned and reinterpreted from the viewpoint of the sustainability because the platform is shared with all products in the product family. In this research, a novel methodology is proposed to identify a sustainable platform for a product family. The sustainable platform has three characteristics: high sustainability, low risk to product redesign, and high commonality. For degree of sustainability, the values of sustainability indicators such as environmental, economic, and social indicators are aggregated to a single sustainability value of a product using a multi-attribute decision making approach. In order to analyze the risk to product redesign, a model of the risk is introduced to predict the unexpected changes of components or sub-systems, as well as its change propagations based on Bayesian network. As main characteristic of current platform design is commonality, the degree of the commonality is also analyzed along the product family. A fuzzy inference system is utilized to assess and select the sustainable platform based on the three characteristics. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, a case study is carried out with a family of coffee makers. Consequently, the proposed methodology contributes to identifying a product platform from the viewpoint of sustainability by linking the sustainability to product design.