Universal product platform and family design for uncertain market

Designing new products for everyone requires numerous functions for many individuals and groups often differentiated by capabilities and limitations. In this paper, we extend concepts from product family and platform design and mass customization to create a method for universal product family design. The objective of this paper is to develop a universal design method to generate economical feasible design concept and evaluate design feasibility with respect to disabilities within a product family in uncertain market environments. In this research, we will consider a platform level problem as a module selection problem that is to determine design parameters in variant modules for unique or common modules by minimizing the production cost and maximizing accessibility in a universal product family. In particular, a Bayesian game is employed to model uncertainty situations regarding market environments. The proposed method is used to decide strategic equilibrium solutions for selecting modules in the universal product family being designed. To demonstrate implementation of the proposed method, we use a case study involving a family of kitchen products.

DS 58-4: Proceedings of ICED 09, the 17th International Conference on Engineering Design

Universal product platform and family design for uncertain market Conference Paper