Robust modular product family design

Lan Jiang; Venkat Allada

doi:10.1117/12.443116

3 October 2001 Robust modular product family design

Lan Jiang, Venkat Allada

Proceedings Volume 4565, Intelligent Systems in Design and Manufacturing IV; (2001) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.443116
Event: Intelligent Systems and Advanced Manufacturing, 2001, Boston, MA, United States

Abstract

This paper presents a modified Taguchi methodology to improve the robustness of modular product families against changes in customer requirements. The general research questions posed in this paper are: (1) How to effectively design a product family (PF) that is robust enough to accommodate future customer requirements. (2) How far into the future should designers look to design a robust product family? An example of a simplified vacuum product family is used to illustrate our methodology. In the example, customer requirements are selected as signal factors; future changes of customer requirements are selected as noise factors; an index called quality characteristic (QC) is set to evaluate the product vacuum family; and the module instance matrix (M) is selected as control factor. Initially a relation between the objective function (QC) and the control factor (M) is established, and then the feasible M space is systemically explored using a simplex method to determine the optimum M and the corresponding QC values. Next, various noise levels at different time points are introduced into the system. For each noise level, the optimal values of M and QC are computed and plotted on a QC-chart. The tunable time period of the control factor (the module matrix, M) is computed using the QC-chart. The tunable time period represents the maximum time for which a given control factor can be used to satisfy current and future customer needs. Finally, a robustness index is used to break up the tunable time period into suitable time periods that designers should consider while designing product families.

Citation Download Citation

Lan Jiang and Venkat Allada "Robust modular product family design", Proc. SPIE 4565, Intelligent Systems in Design and Manufacturing IV, (3 October 2001); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.443116

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