Integrated approach to modularize the conceptual product family architecture

To meet the increasingly heterogeneous market, a product family strategy is needed to determine how customized variants can be derived from a common product platform within acceptable cost and time. Toward this, a suitably conceived and developed product family architecture (PFA) is important for implementing mass customization. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to modularize PFA at the early design phase, which is the conceptual design stage. The PFA can be viewed as a conceptual structure with the following three interrelated elements: module, variant, and coupling interface. Identifying variant as the external driver of architectural variation, this paper develops a variety index (VI) method to estimate effects of customization on the conceptual modules. Rather than just identification of module boundary in the product architecture, the proposed modularization method translates the variety source generated from requirements analysis into a dynamic configuration of the conceptual PFA, involving variety analysis, product modularization, and generation of product portfolio architecture. An example of a power tool design is used to demonstrate the proposed method.