| The key thought of Mass Customization (MC) is to offer customers individualized products at the nearly same efficiency and cost of mass production. MC shifts the traditional customization model that passively responds to customer orders into the pre-customization model that plans initiatively product family in order to improve the ability of enterprises to respond to customer requirements quickly. Therefore, a reasonable product family planning is the foundation and guarantee of mass customization. Aiming to the problems existed at household appliance industry, which is being faced with the great challenge of satisfying customers quickly changing expectations and selecting refrigerators as research object, this dissertation investigates the theories and methods of product planning under MC condition. This study not only enrichs and perfects theories and methods of product planning for MC but also helps enterprises to carry out mass customization effectively in order to quickly respond to customers with different and individualized requirements.It is a new research programme in MC how to establish a product family structure including core technologies of enterprises guided by widespread customer requirements, where it is essential to transform the fuzzy customer requirements into the quantitative and design-oriented engineering indices, to conduct a product platform and to establish a product family architecture. Based on the above considerations, the main research work of the dissertation are as follows:1) The characteristics of the modern design methodology and the product development process in the household appliance industry are analyzed. The product development strategies of satisfying MC needs are introduced. Based on these strategies, a new product development process is established, which can satisfy the needs of MC. The key technologies to carry out the product development process are explored, the infrastructure of the product development process for MC is established.2) A method of modelling for customer different requirements based on utility, analyzing is proposed. The theory and process of full profile conjoint analysis to gain utilities of customer requirements is introduced, which can avoid handling fuzzycustomer requirements. First, utilities of customer requirements are regarded as feature data and a customer becomes a point in utility space. These points are clustered through employing fuzzy logic neural network so that the customers with similar utilities are clustered. The quantitative customer requirements are dealt with by using fuzzy mapping theory in order to accomplish the transform from utility data to fuzzy linguistic terms. Furthermore, linguistic terms are transformed into Boolean value in order to seek frequent sets of product attribute levels preferred by customers by employing Aprioir algorithm in data mining technology so that the rules implied in customer requirements can be found. Then, product requirement models preferred by customer groups are established.3) The method of the product family planning supporting function and structure analysis is investigated. Based on exploring the theories of the product family planning, the house of quality (HoQ) is extended by combining the hypergraph (HG) theory and quality function deployment (QFD) in order to satisfy the need of planning a group of products at the same time. By means of the extended HoQ, customer group requirements are mapped to all the steps of forming product family, some quantitative indices that can facilitate product family planning, including generation variety index, important degree index and coupling index are gained when all kinds of information mapping in product family planning are accomplished. Taking the three indices into consideration, the key degree index that identifies the key grade of an entity part in the product family is provided. According to the sequence of the key degree of an entity part, the product platform representing enterprise resources is conducted and the product fami...
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