Design for optimal commonality in product families is different from design for optimal performance. While optimal performance may be achieved by the choice of appropriate design parameter values for all system components, optimal commonality requires a particular scheme of sharing components among systems. The number of possibilities to share components can be quantified by Bell's number and becomes large quickly, thus making optimization extremely expensive. This paper presents an approach to identify components that may be shared in order to optimize commonality for a product family of arbitrary high-dimensional nonlinear systems. Solution spaces are computed for each system using iterative Monte Carlo sampling. On these solution spaces, all design goals are reached. They are expressed as sets of permissible intervals for all design parameters. When parameter intervals from different systems overlap, they may assume the same value and components may be shared. The approach is applied to vehicle chassis design. A set of common components is computed for 13 vehicles with ten design parameters each, such that all design goals are satisfied and the number of different component designs is small.
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December 2015
Research-Article
Product Family Design With Solution Spaces
Steffen Müller,
Steffen Müller
Professor
Institute for Motor Vehicles,
Technical University of Berlin,
Berlin 13355, Germany
e-mail: steffen.mueller@tu-berlin.de
Institute for Motor Vehicles,
Technical University of Berlin,
Berlin 13355, Germany
e-mail: steffen.mueller@tu-berlin.de
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Markus Zimmermann
Markus Zimmermann
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Markus Eichstetter
Steffen Müller
Professor
Institute for Motor Vehicles,
Technical University of Berlin,
Berlin 13355, Germany
e-mail: steffen.mueller@tu-berlin.de
Institute for Motor Vehicles,
Technical University of Berlin,
Berlin 13355, Germany
e-mail: steffen.mueller@tu-berlin.de
Markus Zimmermann
1Corresponding author.
Contributed by the Design Automation Committee of ASME for publication in the JOURNAL OF MECHANICAL DESIGN. Manuscript received December 28, 2014; final manuscript received September 8, 2015; published online October 16, 2015. Assoc. Editor: Massimiliano Gobbi.
J. Mech. Des. Dec 2015, 137(12): 121401 (9 pages)
Published Online: October 16, 2015
Article history
Received:
December 28, 2014
Revised:
September 8, 2015
Citation
Eichstetter, M., Müller, S., and Zimmermann, M. (October 16, 2015). "Product Family Design With Solution Spaces." ASME. J. Mech. Des. December 2015; 137(12): 121401. https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4031637
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