Abstract

Product platforms have been effectively used by many successful companies for product family design. Technological advancements and changes in customer needs pose problems for robustly designing product platforms over a given planning horizon. to date, most product platform formation approaches are directed by structural (subassemblies and components) considerations and are seldom undertaken at the conceptual design stage. We argue that product platform design should commence at the conceptual design stage rather than the detailed design stage. It is noteworthy that physical structures are the end results of designs already frozen at higher level of functional abstraction. Hence, tackling the platform formation problem should start much before structures are materialized. We propose that the product platform formation approach should be considered at two different stages: (i) conceptual design stage; and (ii) detailed design stage. in reference to the Function - Behavior - Structure model proposed by Gero and Kannengiesser (Gero, J.S. and Kannengiesser, U., Function-behavior-structure: A model for social situated agents. Workshop on Cognitive Modeling of Agents and Multi-Agent Interactions, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2003, Acapulco, Mexico, 2003, pp. 101-107), conceptual design would refer to the design of products at function and technology stage, whereas detailed design would refer to the design of products at the structure stage. This paper discusses a method to form product platforms at the Function-Technology stage which can be correspondingly mapped to the structural stages. Thus, forming product platforms at a higher level of abstraction would enable a better understanding of the complications met at structural level. the FT approach uses Function Technology Ant Colony Optimization (FTACO) method to determine product platform configuration(s). We demonstrate the proposed approach using the example of a computer mouse product family.

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Ant colony optimization; Function-behavior-structure model; Product family; Product platform

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1366-588X; 0020-7543

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2024 Taylor and Francis Group; Taylor and Francis, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Dec 2007

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