Defining modules for platforms: An overview of the architecting process

Product platforms have shown to provide significant cost and time savings while still allowing companies to offer a variety of products. As a result, a multitude of methods have been developed to design product platforms. These methods, however, have been developed independent of one another, and it can be daunting to try to compare the methods and understand which approach might be suitable when or how the methods might interlink, if at all. In this chapter, we review the platform architecting process and tie together several approaches introduced both in this book and the existing literature. A family of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is used as an illustrative example to demonstrate several of these approaches and their integration.