Modular Product Family Design: Agent-Based Pareto-optimization and Quality Loss Function-Based Post-optimal Analysis

Abstract

The advent of mass customization and increased manufacturing competition has necessitated that many companies offer platform-oriented multiple product variants. Various design strategies such as Design for Variety and product family design have become critical in this respect. This paper provides a two-step approach to tackle the modular product family design problem. The first step performs a multi-objective optimization using a multi-agent framework to determine the Pareto-design solutions for a given module set. The proposed multi-agent framework is new and has built in flexibility to handle various constraints such as module compatibility during the optimization process. The second step performs post-optimization analysis that includes a novel application of the quality loss function to determine the optimal platform level for a related set of product families and their variants. The proposed method is applied to a product family design example to demonstrate its validity and effectiveness.

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Sponsor(s)

National Science Foundation (U.S.)

Keywords and Phrases

Logistics; Manufacturing Engineering; Manufacturing Industries; Manufacturing Technology; Operations Management; Production Research and Economics; Production Systems; Production Systems and Automation; Productive and Quality Control Management

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0020-7543

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2003 Taylor & Francis, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Nov 2003

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