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There is a trend toward increased customization of goods to satisfy a wide range of customers using product platforms. However, there is an erroneous notion that product platforms can only be used to provide economic viability in production thanks to the reuse of physical components among a family of products. Yet, this is a limited perception of the potential of a product platform. In this article, an object-oriented approach to support the development of product platforms is proposed to increase efficiency through reuse and flexibility of designs among a family of products. Two modes of the platform development process are addressed: platform preparation and platform execution. Platform preparation prescribes the methods needed to model platform objects, using enhanced function-means models and set-based concurrent engineering processes. During the platform execution process, sets of design alternatives can be configured concurrently throughout the conceptual, system, and detailed phases of the platform development. Three cases illustrate how the same approach may be used in different design scenarios: design space exploration and extension, supply-chain collaboration, and configure-to-order. The approach supports system architects and design engineers in making design decisions that propel the platform development work by enabling analysis in stages where designs are immature and evaluating the goodness of the alternatives early. Ultimately, product platforms can be efficiently developed for modularity and scalability to find feasible product variants and meet the needs of a multitude of customers.

One way for firms to stay competitive is to adapt a platform approach. In product platforms, modules are used as exchangeable design blocks to create a variety in product performance. This is a proven way to get advantages of scale in production by reusing physical parts and investments in manufacturing. To ensure exchangeability between modules, interfaces between modules must be well defined. Hence, from this point of view, there is no such thing as flexible modules. In this research, flexibility refers to the idea of identifying strategic portions of the platform where flexibility is needed and to create the modular division in a way that the assigned modules are de-coupled in theses areas. The presented approach shows how the Design platform concept can be extended by the introduction of flexible modules. These support the Design Platforms by allowing areas of strategic importance to be more flexible and thereby enable room for uncertainties such as fluctuating requirements and future technical development.

VITUM - VINNOVA

For many companies, proficiency in introducing new technologies is central to their business. For instance, for suppliers in the aerospace industry, having extensive knowledge about a specific technology can be crucial for getting to take part in the next airplane project. However, when new technologies emerge as a result of advanced engineering, they are often hard to implement in product platforms. The fragile nature of a working platform originates from the complex relationships between subsystems and variants. Introducing a new technology into the already fine-tuned platform may affect the performance of the platform negatively, or generate a too large development effort to handle. This may lead to reluctance towards introduction of new promising technologies, which in the long run may result in technologies being discarded as infeasible or being introduced much later than necessary. To be able to assess the impact of a technology and safely accommodate it in an existing platform architecture, it needs to be modeled appropriately. Current models of technologies do not describe them in relation to the architecture they are to be implemented in. Further, the common platform architecture models describe change scenarios from a top-down perspective. Technology introduction would require changing the platform from a bottom-up perspective. This paper suggests an approach to accommodate introduction of emerging technologies into a product platform by means of: - Modeling the technologies as systems in a shared model. - Using trade-off curves to describe the bandwidth of technologies. - Introducing a method for changing a present product platform to incorporate new technologies The method addresses a number of different factors regarding the new technology, e.g. its maturity level, in order to assess the appropriate course of action to safely use the technology in the existing platform. The approach is illustrated using a case from the aerospace industry covering the im

The establishment of a platform architecture is a critical task but there is no methodological support for this in the first phases of development. There are several approaches for evaluating designs and architectures when an initial design is present, however, not for the phases foregoing the embodiment of ideas into concepts. This paper fills this void by introducing a new design methodology for modelling, assessing and narrowing down the architectural design space. It allows exploration of more alternatives in the earliest phases of development, which ultimately may produce better designs. The result is a design space of a manageable and desirable size for subsequent embodiment and detailed design with traditional engineering tools. The advantage is that feasibility of the candidate platforms have been established to a high degree of certainty. The approach is illustrated with a case of redesign showing how a manufacturer of parts for a jet engine can use the methodology to model and assess platform concepts in the earliest phase of development.

Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) is a comprehensive approach to achieve efficiency in product development by providing guidelines to align the development activities. Given a certain range in a design problem, a set of design solutions is defined. Eliminating infeasible regions gradually narrows the set down to a working solution. Similar to platform-based development, SBCE further aims to reuse design knowledge from past development efforts. Although they share the goal of design reuse, there is a fundamental difference between SBCE and platform-based design. The SBCE design process produces one solution while the creation and use of a platform produces a product family. This paper elaborates an approach for platform concept development. It uses set-based concurrent engineering and its principles to develop a platform based on functions and design solutions while preserving the bandwidth. It shows how function-means trees and trade-off curves can represent solution spaces. Further, these spaces are narrowed down to manageable and desirable size to represent a product platform in line with current technology and available manufacturing capabilities. The approach is illustrated with a case from the aerospace industry showing how a manufacturer of parts for a jet engine can develop comprehensive concepts for a platform. The design space is narrowed down using desired bandwidth and compatibility between design solutions. While the approach has proven feasible in the test case, it requires manufacturing and technology development to produce trade-off curves. This implicitly requires technology development and manufacturing development to precede product development. Alternatively, product development, production development and technology development need to be perfectly coordinated in a concurrent manner.