Integrating Supplier Selection Into Product Family Design:a Multi-objective Optimization Approach

To satisfy the rapidly changing customer demands and the diversified market niches, product family technology has been widely applied in various industries such as aircraft, automobile, ship, electronics, software, and has become one of the effective methods and core technologies of implementing mass customization. In the early stage of product development, integrating supplier selection into product family design can effectively save production cost and reduce design change. On the basis of reviewing the latest relevant research literatures, an in-depth study of the integration of supplier selection and product family design was conducted aiming at improving the deficiencies of current studies. Some important research progresses have been made and the research achievements have been published in several international journals which are indexed by SCI. The innovative points and constributions of this study mainly include:(1) An evaluation model and an optimization model for integrating supplier selection into product family design are established with the objectives of maximizing the market profit, minimizing the production risk and minimizing the lead time of a product family. Based the proposed models, decision-makers can evaluate and choose the joint optimization schemes of supplier selection and product family design from multiple perspectives according to their preferences and requirements;(2) Multinominal logit (MNL) customer choice rule which can avoid the shortcomings of traditional deterministic customer choice rule and more accurately describe customer purchase behavior is adopted in the optimization model. Meanwhile, MNL choice rule also can be transformed into deterministic choice rule through setting parameters, which makes the optimization model more accurate and universal;(3) Usually, suppliers may adopt some discount policies to attract companies to buy their components, which may have some influences on the final choice results of product family’s components and suppliers. To make the optimization problem in this thesis more actual, the impact of discount of component bidding prices on the optimization result of integrating supplier selection into product family design is considered in the established optimization model;(4) According to the characteristics of established optimization model, NSGA-Ⅱ algorithm is designed to solve the multi-objective optimization model. Finally, some related numerical experiments on the algorithm and model are performed combined with practical cases and the results of experiments are analyed and summarized, which can provide some valuable management insights for enterprises.