Development of sustainable platform for modular product family: a case study

Abstract

Defining product platform architecture is a critical issue to design and develop product variants. Different factors are highly dependent on the architecture type, such as number of variants, to measure modularity level, component commonality, market demand, etc. It is directly related to manage product portfolios and setting up business plan of a company. Before defining a product platform, whether it is modular or integral product designers need to follow specific design guidelines and checklists. This research mainly focuses on to define the platform architecture as well as provides necessary design guidelines and checklists for the product designers. It also highlights an example product of a case company with the objective to clarify/validate the proposed product design approach. In conclusion, this paper outlines the findings from this research and proposed some critical questions need to be answered within the scope of future research potentials.