Abstract
As product variety design has become recognized as an effective framework typically for under the trend toward mass customization, product platform and family design has been intensively studied in the last two decades. While their focuses have been put on consumer products mainly, their possibilities must be spread over various kinds of products, which are under different time frames. This paper discussed the product variety design with focus on strategic planning of product family deployment over time frames, analyzed some cases for validating the general discussion. Firstly, the relationships among platform design, product family development and market mechanisms are reviewed for formally understanding their constraints. Secondly, after product design circumstances are categorized into four types under the matrix by the scale of investment and the scale of production, product variety design circumstances are investigated respectively on the categorized types. Thirdly, some practical cases of product family deployment are analyzed for validating such investigation. Finally, research agendas for developing optimal design methodologies are consequently argued.
