| Summary: | In today’s market, products must meet or exceed customers’ needs while still being competitively priced and developed in the shortest time possible. Product family design and platform-based product development seeks to be the solution to that problem.
Product family design and platform-based product development has received much attention over the last decade. Product family design and platform-based product development have been well recognized as an effective means to achieve mass customization. Investing into product families which build on platforms and shared modules, installs flexibility for a company to accommodate future customization requirements.
In product family design, determining an effective design strategy or commonality for a platform can be considered as a multidisciplinary optimization problem with respect to design variables, production cost, company’s revenue, and customers’ satisfaction. In this paper, we investigate strategic module-based platform design to identify an optimal platform strategy in a product family. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we use a case study involving a family of sailing yachts. The limitations of the approach and future work are also discussed.
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