Research On Evaluation Of Product Family Design And Optimization

Product family development strategy is an effective method and measurement to implement mass customization production. The product design and architecture as a key process of product family development has a decisive influence to the development of products. Introducing the thought of optimization into the product family design process will make the products have the best technological and economic performance. The evaluation of product family design and optimization is aim to comprehensively analysis product family realization, so as to guarantee the success of product strategy. The work of this paper include as follow:Firstly, this article analyzes the evaluation object and purpose, and illustrates basic principles of evaluation indexes by considering the product family features. Then it establishes a two-dimension evaluation model respectively to technical and economic aspects, and gives a quantitative way to realize it.Secondly, this paper analyzes the optimization of product family, and presents a general framework of it. It has been mainly divided into four key processes: problem analysis; model construction; Algorithm to the solution; result analysis. It finds that the optimization of product family design can be summarized to two kinds: the balance of “technology and performance” and the trade-off between profit and cost.Thirdly, this paper explores the purpose of the product family design optimization, and illustrates the basic principles of evaluation indexes by considering the features of product family design. This paper combines the characteristics of mathematical programming optimization and the basic steps, and establishes the evaluation indexes suit to the features of product family and mathematical programming.Fourthly, this paper simply expounds the basic process of analytic hierarchy process(AHP) after studying the product family design and optimization research. Then, the AHP is applied to the product family design evaluation. This paper gives a empirical research by quantitatively evaluating the optimization schemes of gear reducer product family optimization.