A Platform Selection Approach Based on Product Family Ontology Modeling

Product family design is probably the most widely adopted strategy for product realization in mass customization paradigm. With the ever-increasing product offerings in consumer market, current product representation schemes are restricted by their limited capability in handling multiple conceptual relationships amongst product components and rich semantic annotations associated with different design concepts. Previously, we have studied and proposed an ontology-based information representation scheme for product family design, which offers a promising solution to address the aforementioned challenges. In this study, we suggest a new commonality metric and a faceted platform selection approach, which are both created for ontology-based product family representation models. Utilizing this metric and faceted search, we discuss the advantages of our approach compared to existing modeling possibilities. We also exemplify the applications of our proposal towards an optimal configuration of product variants using a case study of four laptop computer families. Finally, we conclude this paper with some indications for future work.