A Strategy for Design of Product Architecture Considering Supply Chain

Achieving a sustainable society necessitates minimizing waste resources and extending the lifespan of products. To achieve this goal, it is essential to advocate for component standardization through product moduiarization and provide product architectures that facilitate easy upgrades, repairs, and overall sustainability. Considering product architecture design methods that focus on sustainability in the supply chain as well as the engineering chain, we evaluate multiple aspects, such as the production capacity of each supplier, delivery capacity of each transportation mode, and on-time delivery rate of each supplier. Specifically, we obtain supply chain quality, cost, environmental loads, and on-time delivery rate values for various product architecture candidates. The values are then compared on a one-to-one basis to select a product architecture that aligns with the designer's preferences and its supply chain. We applied the proposed method to the architecture design of laptop computers. The proposed method derives the product architecture for laptop components and supply chains that simultaneously consider product feasibility and sustainability. The results confirm that our approach can support designers in choosing an appropriate architecture design and supply chain.