Research On Methodology Of Modular Design For Railway Logistics Service Product

With the rapid development of national economy and society, the demand for railway logistics service tend to be increasingly significant. Traditional railway freight service can hardly satisfy the diversity and personality of the customer demand. Faced with the severe market competition, one of the most key problems that railway freight enterprises must address is to increase the market share and improve core competitiveness by product innovation. Advanced product design theory and method are vital for enterprises to undertake product innovation. Under the background of promoting railway freight revolution and developing railway logistics, carrying out researches on railway logistics product design method not only perfects the theory architecture of China railway logistics development, but also enriches the product design methods applied by railway freight enterprises.The utilization of modular design method to design railway logistics products enables railway freight enterprises to satisfy the various and personalized customer demands, which is of great importance for enterprises to improve their profits, service level and market competitiveness.Railway logistics service product modular design method is an innovative application of modular design method on the service product design field.The contents of this study include following 5 aspects:(1) Establishment of the methodology architecture of the railway logistics service product design. Based on the analysis of the current service product design and modular design methods, this study presents a systematical review and defines the corresponding notions of the railway logistics product design, then proposes a comprehensive modular design technique for railway logistics service product based on railway logistics service product modular design method, reliability evaluation method, pricing method and modular configuration method.(2) Formulation of the standardized operating process partition based on module partition model. Market demand is the promotion of the product. Firstly, by comprehensively analyzing the current railway logistics service market and combing with partition result of the railway logistics service product functions, this study optimizes the key process of the entire railway logistics service product. Secondly, based on the optimization in the first step, this study accomplishes the quantitative research on the service product module partition by using the relational matrix between operating process and production function. Moreover, a Fuzzy C-Means clustering algorithm based railway logistics service product operation module partition model is formulated, and a quantum-inspired immune clonal algorithm is also designed to solve the model effectively and efficiently. Finally, a mathematical software package Matlab is used to simulate the model, and then the final module partition result is attained by evaluating the four module partition schemes.(3) Study on the railway logistics service product module configuration method based on constraint satisfaction. Current studies on service module configuration are limited. Through comparing the characteristics of various module configuration methods and the railway logistics service product modular partition problem, this study introduce the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) into this problem. Based on the setting and formulation of variable design and constraint conditions, a CSP based railway logistics service product modular module configuration model is constructed, and an improved backtracking algorithm involving with selective constraint filtering mechanism is designed to solve the model. In the empirical study, for specific customer demand, CSP based model is solved to obtain the railway logistics service product module configuration scheme oriented on specific customer demand.(4) Modelling of the railway logistics service product reliability evaluation based on fault tree analysis. Reliability is an important index in the product design. Therefore, in this study, corresponding reliability evaluation fault trees regarding every operation modules get built after recognize the influencing factors on the reliability of the railway logistics service product, and the minimal cutsets of the fault trees are gained by down-way method. Then fault trees are simulated by the relational matrix based Petri net model where solving algorithm involving with relational matrix is used to gain the minimal cutsets, which atomizes the solving process of dealing with the product reliability. In this section, the simulation result indicates that the proposed Petri net model shows well equivalence to the traditional fault tree method, and presents better feasibility compared with it.(5) Development of the modular design based railway logistics service product pricing model. Price is the essential interface towards the customers. However, due to the distinct differences between the attributions of every railway logistics service product operation modules and their characteristics, it is impossible to price them with identical methods. This study hence classify the operation modules into 4 categories according to their characteristics, and separately undertakes researches regarding different kinds of modules. As for the operation modules oriented on the competition between different industries, the ones within the same industries, and the ones that need to be considered practically, this study formulates an elastic demand based pricing model, a game theory based model and a customer consultation based contract pricing model to regulate their prices, respectively. Note that this study does not take the additional service modules into account.