Product Family Architecture Reasoning

Specifying the product platform and family architecture to support product varieties can be a challenging task for companies. Especially when various viewpoints have to be considered which include product variety, materials, manufacturing complexity, assembly complexity, average component count commonality, assembly sequence and late point differentiation. Consequently there is a need for reasoning to balance multiple viewpoints in the case of product families for the development of good architecture. In this paper we present a product family architecture design approach that can be applied to develop efficient product family architectures for a given set of product functions, while considering multiple viewpoints. In order to identify the efficient product family architecture(s) a three phase approach is presented: (1) Generating a set of feasible module architectures of options for each product function; (2) Combining the feasible module architectures and evaluating the product family architectures to identify candidate product family architectures with high evaluation scores; and (3) Improving the selected product family architecture. The product family architecture design approach is demonstrated using a coffeemaker product family.