ENME Webcast Archives

LEADERS IN MECHANICAL ENGINEERING LECTURE SERIES - SPRING 2007

Product Platform and Product Family Design Optimization: Challenges and Opportunities

Lecturer: Timothy Simpson - Penn State

Original Air Date: Friday, March 2nd at 2:00pm

Abstract: The proliferation of niche markets and the heterogeneity of customer demands is forcing many companies to provide a variety of products, increasing the breadth and depth of their product lines. Meanwhile, product development cycles are increasingly being shortened by market pressures, and cost management and reduction throughout the product lifecycle remains imperative for sustained success and growth. Many companies are successfully responding to these pressures using platform-based product development ? a strategic and cost-effective approach to generate a family of products derived from common components embodied in a shared platform. Platform-based development embodies all of the challenges of product design while adding the complexity of coordinating the development of multiple products in an effort to maximize commonality across the set of products without compromising their individual performance. In this talk, optimization-based approaches for resolving the inherent tradeoff between platform commonality and individual product performance within a product family are discussed. Several formulations of the product family optimization problem are presented and compared in terms of their efficiency and effectiveness in obtaining useful solutions. The design of a family of ten electric motors based on a single product platform is used to demonstrate different problem formulations and highlight the difficulties and challenges facing designers in this active field of research. Promising areas for future work are also discussed.