Design Of Variety Research Articles

An Integrated QFD Models with Variety Management

Improving Design for Variety (DFV) can satisfy more customer requirements, but increase the complexity of product design and manufacturing. QFD, also known as House of Quality (HOQ), is a method that transforms Customer Requirements (CRs) into Engineering Characteristics (ECs), and then transforms ECs into Components Design (CDs). DFV include the variety in products and in components, and the product variety needs to be realized in component variety. With QFD, it is possible to transfer the requirement of CR to the requirement of CD including variety requirement. How QFD responds to DFV management so that it can plan ECs considering the impact of design changes on CDs was examined. This paper proposed a QFD optimization model that can quantify the interrelationships among ECs and support DFV management. A case study on an automobile development verified the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model.

Computer-aided generation of modularised conceptual designs with assembly and variety considerations

Design is the foremost step in the development of any electro-mechanical product. One limitation of existing design tools is that they only focus either on the initial design phase such as customer needs gathering, or on the later phases such as design embodiment or detailed design phase. As a result, there are very few existing computational tools to aid the designers at the conceptual design stage. The proposed research seeks to eliminate this drawback by providing a computerised conceptual design framework that incorporates Modularity, design for assembly (DFA) and design for variety (DFV) principles. Conceptual design alternatives obtained from the proposed research framework are ranked based on minimum assembly time, and are composed of modules in such a way that future changes in customer needs are satisfied only by replacing certain modules. This paper provides a detailed discussion of the proposed framework obtained by amalgamating Modularity, DFA, and DFV. Working of the framework is also demonstrated with the help of an electronic toothbrush design example.

Design for variety: developing standardized and modularized product platform architectures

Developing a robust, product platform architec- ture brings an important competitive advantage to a company. The major benefits are reduced design effort and time-to-market for future generations of the product. This paper describes a step-by-step method that aids companies in developing such product platform architectures. Using the concept of specification ''flows'' within a product de- velopment project, the design for variety (DFV) method develops two indices to measure a product's architecture. The first index is the generational variety index (GVI), a measure for the amount of redesign effort required for future designs of the product. The second index is the coupling index (CI), a measure of the coupling among the product components. The design team uses these two indices to develop a decoupled architecture that requires less design effort for follow-on products. This paper describes the DFV method and uses a water cooler example to illustrate the method.