Abstract
The realization of a sustainable society requires the reduction of waste resources and the lengthening of product lives. For this purpose, it is necessary to promote component standardization through product modularization and to design product architectures that are easy to upgrade and repair, and that are highly sustainable. Previous studies on product architecture design have included design methods that modularize products with close relationships among their components, design methods that focus on profitability to develop product families by sharing some components, and design methods that focus on sustainability in the supply chain. In this study, as one of the product architecture design methods focusing on sustainability in the supply chain, we consider the production capacity of each supplier, the delivery capacity of each means of transportation, and the on-time delivery rate of each supplier, which have not been considered in previous studies. Specifically, it derives values for supply chain quality, cost, environmental load, lead time, and on-time delivery rate for multiple product architecture candidates and compares each index on a one-to-one basis to select a product architecture and its supply chain that meets the designer's objectives. The results of applying the proposed method to the architecture design of laptops confirmed that the method can suggest to the designer the appropriate architecture and its supply chain according to the number of products to be manufactured and their means of transportation.
