Abstract
It has become important to effectively deploy a series of product as a product family for flexibly meeting with a variety of customer's needs under a given platform. How and when each member of the product family is realized and launched to the market are essential factors toward its strategic planning. This paper discusses the impact of resource constraints and characteristics of the market system on product family deployment. In this paper, a planning problem of product family deployment is mathematically formulated with discrete choice analysis under several assumptions, and its optimization method is configured. Case studies are explored with an illustrative example of product family deployment of circuit boards for digital televisions. These investigation indicates that comprehensive model on product family deployment must includes its interaction with resource constraints and market system and that mathematical approaches must be indispensable toward its strategic planning.
