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Product family (PF) is the most important part of product platform. A new method is proposed to mine PF based on multi-space product data in PLM database. Product structure tree (PST) and bill of material (BOM) are used as the data source. A PF can be obtained by mining physics space, logic space and attribute space of product data. In this work, firstly, a PLM database is described, consisting of data organization form, data structure, and data characteristics. Then the PF mining method introduces the sequence alignment techniques used in bio-informatics, which mainly includes data pre-processing, regularization, mining algorithm and cluster analysis. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by a case study of high and middle pressure valve, demonstrating a feasible method to obtain PF from PLM database.

Modular technology can effectively support the rapid design of products, and it is one of the key technologies to realize mass customization design. With the application of product lifecycle management (PLM) system in enterprises, the product lifecycle data have been effectively managed. However, these data have not been fully utilized in module division, especially for complex machinery products. To solve this problem, a product module mining method for the PLM database is proposed to improve the effect of module division. Firstly, product data are extracted from the PLM database by data extraction algorithm. Then, data normalization and structure logical inspection are used to preprocess the extracted defective data. The preprocessed product data are analyzed and expressed in a matrix for module mining. Finally, the fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm is used to generate product modules, which are stored in product module library after module marking and post-processing. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by a case study of high pressure valve.