Abstract
Today's manufacturing has become global at all aspects of marketing, design, production, distribution, etc. While product family design has been an essential viewpoint for meeting with the demand for product variety, its meaning is becoming more broad and complicated with linking product design with issues on market systems, supply chain, etc. This paper calls such design situations 'global product family design,' and develops a mathematical model for the simultaneous decision problem of module commonalization strategies under a given architecture and supply chain configuration through selection of manufacturing sites for module production, assembly and final distribution as an instance of the problems. This paper demonstrates some numerical case studies for ascertaining its validity and promise with an optimization method configured with a genetic algorithm and a simplex method.
