Platform Selection Under Performance Bounds in Optimal Design of Product Families

Abstract

Designing a family of product variants that share some components usually requires a compromise in performance relative to the individually optimized variants due to the commonality constraints. Choosing components for sharing may depend on what performance losses can be tolerated. In this article an optimal design problem is formulated to choose product components to be shared without exceeding user-specified bounds on performance. This enables the designer to control tradeoffs and obtain optimal product family designs for maximizing commonality at different levels of acceptable performance. A family of automotive body side frames is used to demonstrate the approach.