1. Introduction
4. Publications
Faster product development is a major goal for companies in
competitive markets. Product platform architectures support planning for
addressing diverse markets and fulfilling future market desires. Applying
standardization or modularization on product platform components leverages
current product design effort across future products. This work introduces a
method—SMDP (standardization and modularization driven by process effort)—for
focusing engineering effort when applying standardization or modularization on
product platform components. SMDP calculates the total design effort from
current to future generations of the platform following standardization or
modularization of components. By comparing the total design cost of different
simulations, we can direct the design team to standardization or modularization
opportunities. The contribution of this work is in using an estimation of
design effort as the basis for decision in contrast to commonly used static
measures of components' interactions. Such a computational approach allows
conducting sensitivity studies that address the subjective nature of various
estimations needed for exercising SMDP. SMDP is illustrated in a product
platform design of an external-drum plate-setter for the digital prepress
printing market.
Keywords: Product platform architecture;
Product family; Design for variety; Design process modeling; Design structure
matrix (DSM); Reward Markov chain; Genetic algorithm
SMDP could be applied to any type of product where standardization and/or modularization are considered due to various conditions such as future development of product, product introduction into new markets, etc. The method is not limited to physical products but could be applied to systems in general.
Last
modified: 5/25/2006 11:55:00 AM