Module-based Multiple Product Design

Increasing manufacturing competition has necessitated simultaneous design of multiple products. Various design strategies such as Design for Variety (DfV) and product family design have become critical in this respect. This paper provides a new generic approach, which combines aspects of function architecting, multi-objective optimization, and multi agent systems to tackle product platform problems related to multiple product design (MPD). The approach uses functional architecting methods to determine various modules based on functional requirements. Multi-objective optimization using an adaptive multi-agent framework is then used to determine Pareto-design solutions that satisfy various constraints such as module compatibility. Post optimization analysis is applied on the Pareto-design solution set to determine the optimal product platform for the product family. The proposed method is applied to a MPD example to demonstrate its validity and effectiveness.