| Customer need is variable and unstable. It confronts the manufacturing industry with increasing demand for needed variety with limited product design budget. A successful way to offer the needed variety while reducing the product design cost is to launch modular product families. Determining and controlling product architecture is one of the key activities during product family design or redesign. This research will present a systematic method for developing product architecture and configuring varieties, in which two linear programming models will be introduced to identify feasible sub-functions and configure product varieties. Then, a simple example is given to demonstrate the method.; Based on the methodology, a structure of distributed design support system will be formulated using Object-Oriented technology with Unified Modeling Language (UML). This structure will enable the automation of modular product family development and variant configuration in enterprise level. |
