Abstract
Today's manufacturers are required to not only provide each product with high integrity of quality, cost and delivery but also provide a variety of products continuously over product families in order to accommodate them to variation of customers' requirements. To achieve rational and effective design of such a high integrated product family, the derivative products over the family should be developed under the product architecture, which governs the possibility of expanding products under a certain structure. This paper reports our formalization of product architecture design as a basis of our knowledge-based system to rationaly and effectively support product family design under appropriately defining product architectures. In our formulation, the product space is structured to represent a product and a product architecture under complex relations among aspects of the product. Then the design process of product architecture and family is categorized into top-down process and bottom-up process, which consist of the four common operations and their expanded eight operations respectively. These operations can be a basis for developing knowledge-based design systems.
