Abstract
Product families are groups of related products, which are made of common product modules in order to provide a variety of products with lower cost and shorter lead-time. This paper presents the effect of architecting a product family that shares inter-changeable modules. Determining product architecture is one of the key activities of any industrial product development activity. In this paper, first we explain a relationship between modules and components for one product, and propose how to determine product architecture by making modules architecture common. And the effect of the module design is evaluated at the inventory cost, the product performance, and the procurement lead-time. The evaluation can help designers find see how to design product families such as module and component architecture. Efficiency of the proposed method and evaluation is illustrated by using a product module problem of switchgear as an example.
