Product Platform Design And Production Decision Under Uncertain Environment

With the fierce global competition nowadays,companies are facing various problems,such as increasing customer demand,shorter product life cycles and increasing production costs.With the diversification of consumer demand,products must be diversified to cater to consumers' needs;providing a variety of products helps the company expand the target consumer group and maintain the competitiveness of its products.Therefore,in order to attract more customers,gain more market share and increase sales,companies have changed their production model from mass production to mass customization.At present,the production paradigm of mass customization has been widely used in the manufacturing field.One of the key issues of mass customization is to determine the type and quantity of products that should be provided to customers.Customization does not mean meeting all customer requirements without any constraints.Manufacturers should not only control production costs and manufacturing activities,but also control customer requirements.In other words,customization does not mean meeting all the needs of customers,but the company controls the scope of customization and determines which product types to produce so that the production platform can run efficiently.In order to meet customer preferences and control customer needs within a reasonable range,manufacturers need to weigh their different options in the customer information collection model.On the one hand,companies should have a deeper understanding of customer preferences,which can help companies adjust their product family composition;on the other hand,customers' preferences should be better respected.In the context of mass customization,more and more companies have begun to pay great attention to product platform strategies.The characteristics of platform strategies are that they can adapt to different customer needs at a lower price and can reduce production costs through economies of scale.When a company plans to develop new products,it usually divides existing consumer groups into different market segments based on their purchasing power and consumption characteristics.Each market segment has its own specific requirements.The company collects different consumer needs and designs a product line to meet the needs of these different customers.Through the platform strategy,the same components used by different products in a product series are produced together on the platform,which greatly improves production efficiency,thereby making up for the loss of economies of scale caused by product diversification.This paper considers the product single-platform design under the component sharing strategy,the product modular platform design of the outsourcing strategy,and the product multi-platform modular design of the standardization and redundancy strategy.We first consider the most basic product single-platform strategy.Under this strategy,the manufacturer designs a product platform that is common to all products.The biggest limitation of this platform strategy is the lack of versatility between products,so we propose the strategy of component sharing to make up for the shortcomings in the single-platform strategy.Misuse of platform-based strategies can cause some problems.The main challenge facing manufacturers is to balance versatility and product differentiation: emphasizing product platform and versatility can effectively reduce unit costs,and economies of scale play an important role in it.However,this will affect the diversity of products and lead to a decline in customer satisfaction.In this article,we use some constraints to maintain a balance between versatility and product differentiation to ensure consumer utility.Manufacturers see component sharing as a way to ensure product diversity.Component sharing is a product-based strategy that can share product-specific components and concepts between projects or products.In the component sharing strategy,the core concepts and components are standardized to be common to all products,and the unique concepts and components that differ between products are manufactured separately.Whether a manufacturer supports component sharing depends on factors such as cost,product quality and performance,and organizational structure.In this article,we focus on these key issues and related factors that support or prohibit component sharing strategies.Although platform strategy and component sharing are popular in the manufacturing industry,the combination of the two has not been fully studied.In addition,the effectiveness of uncertainty theory in estimating customer needs and economies of scale has received little research attention.Therefore,we intend to fill the gaps in the literature by formulating a simple but easy to extend product platform and component sharing model.We have proposed four methods to help the company find the best solution for product performance and maximum profit.We assumed uncertainty about customer needs and economies of scale,proposed an uncertainty model,and found the most profitable way to develop the entire new product range.Detailed numerical analysis provides support for the feasibility and effectiveness of the model.After discussing the single-platform strategy,we discuss the modular platform design and production decision optimization that will be applied more widely after this.Modular platform design is widely used in manufacturing and is very effective in providing mass customization production.This strategy can help manufacturers understand customer preferences and needs,propose product-related rules,select alternative components and modules,and build theoretical models.However,in modular product design,manufacturers are faced with the problem of how to reduce customer response time to further increase market share,and most modular product platform design and production decision-making studies do not fully consider uncertainty(such as response Time uncertainty).To fill this gap,we propose a new uncertain product configuration model.The model is based on uncertain response times and time-sensitive requirements.We use uncertainty theory to transform this model into a deterministic model.Another contribution is that we proposed an outsourcing strategy to make up for the shortcomings of the modular strategy,explored the interdependence between uncertain response time and outsourcing strategy,and used CPLEX 12.8 to solve this uncertain mixed integer programming programming problem.In a series of numerical experiments,we found that profit and procurement strategies are very sensitive to uncertain delivery time,and outsourcing strategy is an effective method that can help companies reduce losses due to uncertain factors,and in large scale products,the performance is even better under the circumstances.On the basis of the first two parts of the research,we combined the platform strategy with the modular strategy,and proposed a multi-platform modular strategy.Although modular product design and platform strategy have become key factors in product configuration,there are few studies on modular multi-platform assembly configuration.According to previous research,when a single platform is introduced,the performance of the platform components of all products is the same,which can lead to over-design of low-end products or under-design of high-end products.In order to solve this problem,on the basis of the first two parts,we combined the platform strategy with the modular strategy,and proposed a multi-platform modular strategy.In the case of multiple platforms,manufacturers can use different sets of common core modules in the mass assembly line to reduce versatility,so that the platform variables have multiple common modules.Therefore,the multi-platform strategy increases the uniqueness of the product,which may increase the product share of the high-end market and save capital investment in the low-end market.According to customer requirements in a mass customization environment,product platform design usually needs to face the problem of how to choose general components or modules for personalized products.However,the strategies adopted by most of the existing product platform designers are usually extreme,either with complete diversity(completely personalized)or standardized products(a limited set of products).On the basis of the multi-platform modularization strategy,in order to help manufacturers to manufacture products more flexibly,we propose a standardization and redundancy strategy.We relaxed the assumption that the products provided must accurately meet the required performance or customer requirements.We believe that there are uncertainties in the production process and introduced the assembly and disassembly process in the establishment of the model.We propose a new uncertain decision model.The model uses redundancy and standardization strategies to find the best product configuration to minimize the total cost.The model defines customer needs and preliminarily builds the product assembly sequence.Then,the model uses a modular multi-platform assembly manufacturing method to increase the diversity of products in mass customization.Next,we use CPLEX 12.8 software to linearize and solve the uncertainty in product configuration using uncertainty theory.Finally,through sensitivity analysis,we give relevant suggestions on the optimal number of platforms and production strategies and determine the final customized product specifications.From the mobile phone case study,we found that standardization is better than redundancy strategy,and flexible platform strategy can effectively reduce production costs.Nowadays,in order to meet customer needs,mass customization is necessary.Although it is possible for manufacturers to maintain customer loyalty by providing various products at reasonable prices,they still face difficulties in mass production efficiency and customer demand.Therefore,the main challenge of this article is how to maintain high customer utility while maintaining low costs.The model proposed in this paper helps manufacturers configure product configurations more flexibly,and all the strategies proposed can help maintain product diversification at low cost.