Managing modularity in product family design with functional modeling

Recent market transition from mass production to mass customization forces manufacturers to develop product families with a common platform to increase design variety, shorten time-to-market, and reduce production costs. This paper presents a new functional modeling approach to support identification of both shared and individual behavioral modules across a family of products for module-based product family design. After separate functional modeling of each product variant, the individual functional models are merged into a single, coherent, and unified family functional model to determine all the shared and individual behavioral modules. The modularity in the family functional model is further explicitly identified using a behavioral modularity matrix of product variants versus behavior. The proposed approach provides a fast method for generating new concept variants during the conceptual design of a family of products. The rationale of managing modularity in product family design with functional modeling is manifested using a modular design example of a family of automatic assembly devices.