Common platform development: Designing for product variety

One of the key elements in enabling product variety is the product platform. Research done in the areas of Mass Customization, Design for Product Variety, Product Family Design, etc. has outlined different characteristics of product variety and stresses the need for developing a common platform. But the current state of research does not address the issue of how to develop modular common platforms to support family of products considering both structure and assembly viewpoints. To fulfill this area of research a P&barbelow;roduct F&barbelow;amily R&barbelow;easoning S&barbelow;ystem (PFRS) is developed to focus on the commonization of product platforms to produce the necessary variety.; The main objective of this research is to assist designers in designing several related products from a common base for different market segments. The key question investigated is: How can configuration design methods be used to develop product platform strategy to provide necessary product variety? This question is answered at two levels: (1) How to design common platforms for a family of products? and (2) How to synthesize and reason about the variety that can be supported from the common platform. Graph and set representations are developed and used to capture product information. Mathematical tools based on graph theory and graph grammar have been developed to operate on these representations to determining the common platform and to capture platform and product family constraints.