Optimal Design Methodology of Common Components for a Class of Products: Its Foundations and Promise

This paper discusses the optimal design of common components used for a class of products. While simultaneously designing multiple products has become an important concept in manufacturing in these days, alliances involved in such activities are extended from the traditional form. This means the existence of a chance that an integrator designs a set of components apart from particular products or a supplier commonalizes components independently from integrators. That is, any methodology for simultaneously designing a set of components becomes necessary behind ones for simultaneously designing a set of products. This paper formulates the design problem of common components as an optimization problem, investigates the condition of optimal design through the tradeoff among the level of system-level performance, the number of different components, etc. Then a computational procedure is configured for optimizing the commonalization of components apart from designing a particular set of products by using multivariate analysis, an optimization code based on mini-max operation and a genetic algorithm for constrained nonlinear mathematical programming. Finally the proposed optimization procedure is preliminarily applied to a design problem of liftgate dumpers for passenger cars for demonstrating the meaning of the levels of optimal design and tradeoff structure.