Optimize Variant Product Design Based on Component Interaction Graph

Dominating markets with a single product is increasingly difficult, and instead numerous industries are evolving towards mass customization, meaning the production of individually customized and highly varied products or services (Pine, 1993). This proliferation of models allows consumers to find a product that best suits their individual needs. The need for increasing product variety and shorter development time brings more complexity to the company than ever. Corporations are striving to bala nce customer satisfaction and cost savings, and product design is becoming essential for accomplishing this. Since developing an entirely different product is often uneconomical. A better method is to develop a product architecture that enables a company to offer highly differentiated products that share a substantial fraction of their components. Therefore, introducing product variety within a robust architecture offers one means of enhancing mass customization. Besides, an increase in product variety brings an increase in the volume of information exchanged between customers, designers and marketing department. Due to such increased information processing load, information technology is needed to tackle this problem. This chapter investigates the product variety design methodologies through the computational design optimization methods, and developing product architecture under the support of information technologies. It aims at providing product designers a rational and systematic methodology in dealing with product variety from both qualitative and quantitative viewpoints.