Modular and platform methods for product family design: literature analysis

After the industrial revolution, the literature has mentioned different "principles" to allow a better management of the production and product life cycle activities. For example the principle of standardization was first mentioned in the literature by an automobile engineer and placed in a real context by Henry Ford. Standardization has made possible the configuration of different products using a large set of common components. Another strategy called "modularization" was first mentioned in the literature in the 60s. The modularity proposed to group components of products in a module for practical production objectives. Today, modularity and standardization are promising tools in product family development because they allow to design a variety of products using the same modules of components called "platforms". Using platforms allows important family design savings and easy manufacturing. In this paper we give a literature review of the platform concept with a special interest on the efficient product family development. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 mentions the general context of modularity to develop product variety. Section 2 details the importance of product architectures in the literature for a modular design. Section 3 points on some important works that apply some modular and platform methodologies.