Abstract
In order to deploy a good product family, a designer should consider product architecture, which explicitly defines relationships between customer's requirements, functions and components, and determine commonalization of components while diversifying customer's requirement. This paper reports a quantity space of attributes, which characterize products, and the formalization of product family design process. It represents plural products within a product family as members of quantity space, and defines mapping between attributes in customer's requirements, functions and entities. These facilitate a designer to explicitly grasp mapping structures between attributes of customer's requirement, function and entity, and to deploy product family under the mapping. Based on the attribute quantity space mapping structure, we introduce the formal definition of five steps and several operations of product architecture design process, and implement two indices for evolutional satisfaction of customer's requirement and production cost. A prototype design system is implemented under knowledge management approach, which we have been developing to support evolutional design such as product architecture design. It ascertains that the developed formalization and system can support a designer toward the optimal product family.
