Generalised design for optimal product configuration

Abstract

Design of configurable product family or design for configuration has emerged as an efficient tool to deal with the new challenges of a continuous dynamic and volatile market. Design for configuration provides an efficient and effective mean to realise the product variety. This paper tackles the optimal product configuration. The introduction of fuzziness to capture the subjective nature of the design for configuration process, the building of multiple fuzzy models, which correspond to the multiple views of a configurable product, permits to propose the possible physical solutions to configure a product. It corresponds to the consensus problem of design for configuration. The extended problem formulation is the proposition of an optimal product configuration. The optimal solution is searched using p median problem formulation. The proposed approach is validated by the design case study of a configurable product.