Abstract
A product family is a group of functionally equivalent products that share similar features and that are grouped for planning purposes. Creating product family is an effective strategy for many manufacturing industries for its reduction on manufacturing cost and development time. This paper proposes a computational and graphical information model of a product family. Based on this model, a system is developed to support engineers and designers make the right decision on designing the optimum product architecture. "Integration Rate" between design parameters is defined to express how much integration takes place when designing these parameters. An evaluation method using "Integration Rate" is proposed to support engineers and designers determine that optimum product architecture has been developed. The goal of the research is to design the optimum product architecture, and also design the organizational structure that best performs the family product strategy.
