Integrated Decision Making Of Product Family Architecting And Supply Chain Postponement Strategy By Leader-follower Interactive Optimization

Product Family Architecting is the front-end process of Supply Chain Postponement Strategy,which also plays a crucial role in defining the common platform and product variants in mass customization.Nowadays,the common practice of customization of modules that need to be postponed obtains that the postponement strategy should be applied appropriately to product family architecting.Postponement is a process that postpones product customization to the end of the supply chain,which is crucial to achieve customization.Prevailing researches focus on product family architecting and the supply chain postponement strategy separately,and rarely reflect the correlation between product family architecting and the supply chain postponement strategy separately.This paper aims at the undetermined product family architecture,revealing the underlying decision between product family architecting and the supply chain postponement strategy separately.This paper puts forward a new methodology for joint optimization of product family architecting and the supply chain postponement strategy separately with an interactive evaluation mechanism by Stackelberg game,describing the deficiency in these two fields and summarizing the researches of the bilevel programming.A bilevel mixed 0-1 programming model with virtual compound modules corresponding with postponed parts is formulated to describe the leader-follower decision making process.The upper level optimization problem is established for identification of basic modules and compound modules with maximizing customer-perceived utilities and postponement utilities of product families,and the low level focuses on choosing postponement service providers for minimizing the total supply chain cost,with decision making of postponement implementation.A nested genetic algorithm is proposed to cope with the bilevel optimization model.Finally,based on the work above,a case study of laser printer is given to illustrate the feasibility of the methodology,and the difference between the methodology and other methods is stated with comparisons.