Module Family Design for Modular Product

Modular structure based products have been chosen by industries to provide sufficient variety of their products to the market. In this work, a multi-objective product family design that aims to develop a module family for a modular product is discussed. Enterprise considerations such as market share and cost-savings benefits are integrated with the product family design. A representation scheme is introduced to enable us to integrate the qualitative market segmentation grid (MSG) with the scalability evaluation which plays a significant role in determining the appropriate configuration of the module product as well as the final product in different market niches. The combinatorial problem with a large number of module configurations is solved through the implementation of genetic algorithm of NSGA-II. The design of a family of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) for a modular structure based electronic control unit (ECU) is used to demonstrate the proposed approach.