Correlation Of Product Warranty And Modularity Based On Cost

Nowadays, modularity has been widely accepted as an e?ective way to o?er cus-tomers product diversity and variety at a feasible cost level. With the concept of mod-ularity, entities called modules are consisted with components, and can be designed,produced and purchased independently. Manufacturers may create modular productportfolio for di?erent requirements through selecting candidate components, parame-terizing modules and determining specifications.All factors in a life cycle should be involved as criteria in measuring the good-ness of modularity, including product warranty performance and cost. Product war-ranty refers to the contractual agreement between a seller and a buyer, and definesthe responsibility of the former when a product performs lower than the expectation.Warranty has always been regarded as an important measure of product quality and re-liability, and involved in the design stage. However, no existing literature has studiedthe relationship between modularity and warranty.In the present paper, an empirical study is firstly conducted in ninety-three manu-facturers in China to reveal that firms with modular and diverse products work more inwarranty practices but have no better output in warranty performance. Such a findingproves the necessity of linking warranty and modularity.Then, customized warranty plans are generated for a modular product family.Reliability of each component is measured with a Markov method, so as to calculatethe warranty cost of a configuration scheme. Customized warranty plans for variedwarranty periods can be generated given thresholds in product selling prices.On the other hand, warrant performance and cost are taken as impact factors inmodularity analysis. There are two steps in this kind of analysis: module construc-tion and product configuration, where warranty acts as one of optimization objectives.Particle swam optimization (PSO) and fuzzy multi-objective optimization algorithm(FMOOA) are respectively used to deal with the large scale calculation in moduleconstruction and the optimization under uncertainty coming from the prediction forwarranty performance and cost. Based on the above studies on the correlation of warranty and modularity, a graphand matrix based integration method is proposed as the end of this paper, so integratethese two fields together with representing the possibility of product functional un-availability, the basis of warranty cost, in the modular configuration process, throughmapping minimal cuts in fault trees to the product technological model.