| Today's competitive and highly volatile markets are redefining the way companies do business. Companies are being faced with the challenge of providing as much variety as possible for the market with as little variety as possible between products. Developing a family of products—a group of related products derived from a common product platform—provides an efficient and effective means to realize sufficient product variety to satisfy customer demands. Product families based on derivatives of a common scalable product platform are investigated in this dissertation. In particular, the Product Platform Concept Exploration Method is developed, presented, and tested as a Method which facilitates the synthesis and Exploration of a common Product platform Concept which can be scaled into an appropriate family of products. Testing and demonstration of the Product Platform Concept Exploration Method occurs through two example problems, namely, (1) the design of a universal electric motor platform which is scaled around the stack length of the motor to realize a family of electric motors capable of satisfying a variety of torque and power requirements, and (2) the design of a General Aviation aircraft platform which is scaled into a two seat, a four seat, and a six seat configuration to realize a family of aircraft capable of satisfying a variety of performance and economic requirements.; Comparison against baseline products and individually designed benchmark products are used to verify and validate the method. A product variety tradeoff study is also performed with the General Aviation aircraft platform to assess the compromise between commonality and performance of the individual aircraft. In addition, metamodeling techniques to facilitate the implementation of robust design are examined. Specifically, the utility of kriging and space filling experimental designs for building inexpensive-to-run approximations of deterministic computer analyses is explored by means of a rocket nozzle design example, a testbed of structural and mechanical engineering problems, and the General Aviation aircraft example problem. |
