Product Family Deployment Through Optimal Resource Allocation Under Market System

A series of products, i.e. a product family is deployed for effectively and flexibly meeting with a variety of customer’s needs under a given product platform. Since such a deployment consumes various engineering resources and simultaneously brings profits gradually over the time sequence, when and how respective modules are designed and respective products are launched to the market must be rationally planed. Further, as a nature of product families, module commonalization accelerates the deployment but infuses some overheads on features and production cost. This paper investigates such a product family deployment problem under the optimal design viewpoint. After some general discussions, a mathematical model of dynamic design decisions is conditionally developed by integrating a combinatorial optimization technique for decision of module selection on commonalization and a market system model with discrete choice analysis and for describing the compromise among sequence of product rollout, arrangement of product lineup, required engineering resource, expected profit, etc. Then, the compromise among those factors is illustrated through the case study on a simplified deployment problem of circuit boards for digital television sets. Finally, an optimal planning approach for product family deployment and accompanied resource allocation is envisioned based on the developed model and findings from the case studies.