A scalable product family design method based on sensitivity analysis for performance and cost

A successful product family design should achieve two goals: minimizing the whole performance loss to satisfy customer requirements and minimizing the whole production cost to meet the enterprise benefits. The achievement of the two goals will depend on an appropriate selection of the platform, which is the key for product family design. In order to find a right platform decision criterion which can explicitly embody the two goals, this paper tries to define two metrics, performance sensitivity and cost sensitivity, to measure the two goals respectively and then explore a comprehensive metric to determine the platform. Based on this, the product variants can be optimized individually. This method can simplify the modeling and computing of product family design by decomposing the problem in an effective way. Only scalable product family design is considered and a family of universal electric motors is used to demonstrate the method.