Product Platform and Product Family Design: Methods and Applications

Designing products and product families so they may be customized for the global marketplace and achieving these goals in abbreviated time period, while maintaining production efficiencies are the keys to successful manufacturing operations. The research on these areas has matured rapidly over the last decade. The aim of this volume is to show different techniques for developing platform architectures, strategies for planning how far a product can be developed, and identifying methods to optimize product design.