Production cost modeling to support product family design optimization

Product family design involves carefully balancing the commonality of the product platform with the distinctiveness of the individual products in the family. While a variety of optimization methods have been developed to help designers determine the best design variable settings for the product platform and individual products within the family, production costs are thought to be an important criterion to choose the best platform among candidate platform designs. Thus, it is prerequisite to have an appropriate production cost model to be able to estimate the production costs incurred by having common and variant components within a product family. In this paper, we propose a production cost model based on a production cost framework associated with the manufacturing activities. The production cost model can be easily integrated within optimization frameworks to support a Decision-Based Design approach for product family design. As an example, the production cost model is utilized to estimate the production costs of a family of cordless power screwdrivers.