From user requirements to commonality specifications: An integrated approach to product family design

Across many industries, the prevailing practice is to design families of products that exploit commonality to take advantage of economies of scale and scope while targeting a variety of market applications. A product family is a group of related products that are derived from a common set of components, modules, and/or subsystems to satisfy a variety of market applications where the common "elements" constitute the product platform. Successful development of a platform and deployment of the product family requires input from multiple disciplines (e.g., marketing, engineering, manufacturing), and a variety of methods and tools exist to support different aspects of product family design. Unfortunately, many of these methods and tools have been developed - and consequently exist - in isolation from one other. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for integrating several of these disparate tools to translate user needs and requirements into commonality specifications during product family design. In particular, we integrate the market segmentation grid, Generational Variety Index (GVI), Design Structure Matrix (DSM), commonality indices, mathematical modeling and optimization, and multi-dimensional data visualization tools to translate user requirements into commonality specifications for a product family: what to make common, what to make unique, and the best parameter settings for each component and/or subsystem. The design of a family of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) is included to demonstrate the proposed approach and highlight its benefits and limitations.