Key Theory And Application Of Accurate Multi-series Product Family Planning

With worldwide fierce competition in product development between companies increasing, how to grasp and transform the accurate customer needs into the product promptly has become the key to obtain customers satisfaction. Product family development is a technique which is developed by mix disciplines across mathematics, engineering, information, statistics, and management etc. It is to help companies develop products which are precisely customized by customers need and shorten the product family development life cycle. It is predicted that the next10years, the technique of product family development will become the key factor which decides the level of innovation and product design capability of the company.Recent years, the product family development has been a hot research topic. The main difficulties of the product family development currently remain below:First, the difficulty and reliability of obtaining the information of customer needs. Second, the accuracy and dynamic of the conversion of the customer needs. Third, the product functional configuration’s the flexibility and rationality. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a product platform model which is based on several techniques. This paper mainly covers the following aspects:(1) Based on the theories of Kano, fuzzy clustering analysis and Product demand structure topology model, the paper proposes demand level analysis model and multidimensional demand data structure model. The former is dealing with fuzzy demand information and customer needs for accurate classification; The latter is to use data to storage customer needs as well as to give the customers demand with more attributes.(2) Propose demand dynamic conversion technology to improve the existing static characteristics of traditional customer needs conversion. This technique combines the advantages of quality housing (QH) and BP artificial neural network, which helps to transform precise customer needs with dynamic response mechanism and works like a professor making self-decision.(3) Build a product platform and propose the reconstructed customer needs of multi-family product module configuration model which is based on the theory of modular product family design and product variant design principles.In order to verify the feasibility of the platform, last section of this article take an example in the product family planning of electric automotive electronics products. The platform is built on the condition of designing a car which is suitable for young people with good driving comfort and dynamic performance.