Product Family Design Optimization Methods With Considering Value-added Service

Nowadays,with the gradually deepening of economic globalization,the competition among enterprises has become increasingly fierce and the requirement of customers has become increasingly critical and diversified.As a result,designing single product traditionally can not meet the diversified needs of customers.To occupy more market shares,enterprises have to design products based on the fully understanding of customers' preferences.Therefore,many enterprises are designing a family of products instead of single product to ensure the maximum satisfaction of the customers in different market segments and improve customers'satisfaction and the market competitiveness of enterprises comprehensively.Moreover,customers are not satisfied with only product for the saturation or even surplus of most products,which is caused by the high popularization of science and technology and the rapid spread of information technology.Customers hope the companies provide not only diversified products but also abundant and personalized services.Some global companies,like GE and IBM,are now providing integrated solutions by bundling products and services.By providing service together with product,these companies have gained more chances to interact with customers,generated greater customer value,improved brand preference and loyalty and created more cross-selling opportunities.Hence,many company managers have realized the importance of the product/service bundling strategy and transferred the company center strategy to product/service bundling actively.In this research,a family of products with considering value-added service is optimally designed.The main research work includes the following two aspects:(1)For the problems in product family design optimization with considering value-added service,part-worth utility values are used to express consumers' preferences of all the attribute levels and the utility of a product profile is assumed as a linear function of the part-worth utility values of the selected product attributes and service attributes levels,and the consumer preference model is formulated.The consumer choice behavior is considered as probabilistic and the MNL probabilities choice rule is used to model the consumer choice behavior.When calculating the market revenue of the product family,the discount rate of the profit of each time slots in the product sales period and the product lifecycle period is considered.Based on the work mentioned above,we studied two cases,i.e.,considering one kind of value-added service and considering multiple kinds of value-added services during the product family design process,and an optimization model with the objective of maximizing the profit of product and service for each case is established respectively.Then,a genetic algorithm is developed to solve each optimization model for the two cases.And,hill climbing method is embedded to the genetic algorithm to solve the product family design optimization model with considering just one kind of value-added service.(2)Numeric experiments for the optimization models through an example of e-book reader product family are performed.Two numeric experiments for the product family design optimization model with considering one kind of value-added service and multiple kinds of value-added services are designed,respectively.Simultaneously a numeric experiment for the product family design optimization problem without considering service is designed as a reference experiment.The optimal settings of product attributes design,the optimal settings of service attributes design,the total profit of the product family,the profit of product and the profit of value-added service in different cases are obtained by analyzing the results of the experiments.The necessity of providing value-added service and service diversity in product family design is verified at last.