Abstract
As mechanical products have become further complicated and diversified, integrative design of their components, such as motors, fans, and pumps, through commonalization has become essential for shorter lead time and more cost-saving behind the mainstream. This paper names those products as intermediate functional products and proposes their lineup design method. Scale and coefficient identify their performance. Thus, they are arranged over a two-dimensional space of design requirements to minimize the lead time and production cost with maintaining performance optimality. The former cannot be measured quantitatively before actual production. Thus, minimizing the process complexity is demanded. The latter criterion translates into optimizing the worst-case performance across the requirement space. Those understanding leads to a design method by enumerating possible commonalization patterns, exclusively arranging the lineup for each pattern optimally, and investigating the best lineup through trade-off analysis. While the lineup arrangement under a pattern takes a mini-max type formulation, its optimization is performed based on monotonicity analysis efficiently. This paper demonstrates the formulation and procedures through an application to universal motors.
