Research On Bi-level Programming Problem And Interactive Fuzzy Algorithm In Product Family Design

As the extended form of simple product, the theories of Product Family has been a very popular theme among researchers and business world under the big picture of mass production and globalization. In fact, the design and manufacturing of product family has now been the main factor for company to gain its competitiveness in its product. Because product family design is the problem which has more than one decision makers, for example, the designers in the different stages, different suppliers or even government monitoring the market, which means the product family design problem has the characteristics of multi-agent decision making process, which inspire many researchers using bi-level programming to solve the problems in product family design which can model the product family problem in a more accurate and dynamic way than traditional single level programming or multi-stage programming. But on the other hand, the existing algorithms solving bi-level programming problems do not perform efficiently in solving the joint optimization problems in product family design. As a result, it is important to have an efficient algorithm to solve the bi-level programming problems in product family design.In this paper, we first make a summary for the pro and cons of the existing algorithms and the existing researches on using bi-level programming to solve product family problems and then a interactive fuzzy algorithm is propose based on the mathematical characteristics in the bi-level programming problems in product family design. At last, we use the proposed algorithm in solving a modular configuration-parameter design problems of the GE's electrical engine product family.