Evaluation of product performance in product family design re-use

Abstract

Design re-use is essential to competitive and sustainable product development. In product family design, re-use leads to savings in resources and ensures sustainable production. However, a complete design re-use process model for product family design has not been well defined. Moreover, the evaluation of product performance based on component-level re-use has been inadequate, failing to explore the effective application of design re-use in product family design. This paper presents a product family design re-use (PFDR) methodology to address these deficiencies. A three-stage process model is proposed to manage the design processes. The information content assessment (ICA) method is proposed for product performance evaluation. This method defines the logical steps to compute the information content that is used as a uniform, dimensionless metric of product performance. In a case study, a product family of cellular phones were developed using this design re-use methodology. It is demonstrated that the design re-use methodology proposed in this paper can effectively manage the product family design processes, and the ICA method provides a useful way for performance evaluation.