Design for robustness of modular product families for current and future markets

Lan Jiang, Venkat Allada*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

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 the 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, the customer requirements are selected as signal factors; the future changes of customer requirements are selected as noise factors; an index called the quality characteristic (QC) is set to evaluate the product vacuum family; and the module instance matrix (M) is selected as the control factor. Initially a relation between the objective function (QC) and the control factor (M) is established, and then the search space is systematically explored using the complex 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 (in the example, the module matrix, M) is computed using the QC-chart. The tunable time period represents the maximum time for which a given module matrix can be used to satisfy the current and future customer needs. Finally, a robustness index is used to break up the tunable time period into suitable time periods that the designers should focus on while designing product families.

Original languageEnglish
Pages173-182
Number of pages10
Publication statusPublished - 2001
Externally publishedYes
Event6th Design fro Manufacturing Conference - Pittsburgh, PA, United States
Duration: 9 Sept 200112 Sept 2001

Conference

Conference6th Design fro Manufacturing Conference
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPittsburgh, PA
Period9/09/0112/09/01

Keywords

  • Modular product
  • Product family
  • Robust design

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Jiang, L., & Allada, V. (2001). Design for robustness of modular product families for current and future markets. 173-182. Paper presented at 6th Design fro Manufacturing Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.