Research On Product Family Configuration Design And Optimization Method Based On Modular Product Family Master Structure

Under the mass customization pattern, enterprises are urged to providecustomized products to meet customers’ diverse demands. So an enterprise must havecreative product design ability and rapid requirements response ability. Thus how toconfigure out the personalized products that meet the diverse customers’ demandrapidly has a significant meaning for an enterprise to seize the market opportunities.In order to improve enterprises agile design capability and ready to the variousrequirement of customer at any moment, this paper divides the process of productfamily configuration management into three stages: product family master structuredesign, configuration optimization and configuration evaluation. And then makes andeep association study on the three progressive stages to form a product familyconfiguration management system concept model, at the same time, sums up aprocess model of the system.Firstly, this paper presents the conceptual design stage and the modular designstage, aiming at establishing modular product family master structure. It can provide amodule database for product family configuration optimization model that based onconfiguration rules and module variables.At the same time, this paper studies the product family configuration designframework based on the product family master structure, which shows how a specificcustomized product BOM can be formed through function selecting and physicalmodule matching process in a visual form. What’s more, the paper establishes aconfiguration optimization model which can reflect this configuration process, toconfigurate out the specific customized products after obtaining customer orders.Based on a product family master structure, we can make a selection and combinationof different modules under certain constraints, to determine the structure and theBOM of products with different performance and specifications.In addition, due to some functions of a product can be realized by many physicalmodules.A product instance configuration result may contain multiple solutions, sothis paper puts forward a configuration evaluation model to maximize the customerssatisfaction and enterprise benefit, by using the analytic hierarchy process to evaluatethe configuration scheme, and finally provide the best product configuration result.