A method for product platform planning based on pruning analysis and attribute matching

作者:Zhang, Qiuhua; Peng, Weiping; Lei, Jin*; Dou, Junhao; Hu, Xiangyang; Jiang, Rui
来源:Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 2019, 30(3): 1069-1083.
DOI:10.1007/s10845-017-1305-7

摘要

Product platform planning can greatly support product variant design, which is of great help to the implementation of mass customization (MC). In most of product platform planning methods, product modules and product families have been usually preplanned before products are designed, which would not make full use of the existing product resources. In this paper, we propose a method for product platform planning using the existing product data in product lifecycle management (PLM) database. The proposed method introduces two key technologies, i.e., pruning analysis and attribute matching. The pruning analysis is used to find out the sharing parts of different product families, which constitutes the basic framework of product platform; the attribute matching is used to classify product modules into different categories according to their sharing degrees, which reveals the relationships of different product modules and forms the association rules of product platform. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by the product data in the PLM database of a valve company. The proposed method greatly improves the reuse rate of existing product resources, providing an effective and fast way for enterprises to implement the MC strategy.