| Description |
ix, 112 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm. |
| Summary |
"Many companies strive to strike the right balance between the level of customization and the degree of commonality between product variants. The rapid change in technologies and customer preferences renders the issue of customization vs. commonality a pivotal problem to strategically managing evolving product families and achieving economies of scale. Platform formation is seen as the key means to increase structural commonality. To date, most commonality indices have been reported at the structural level. Considerations to compute similar indices at the conceptual level of the product architecture have not yet been undertaken. We argue that it is essential to determine indices estimating the extend of architectural reuse and commonality at two levels of architecture design: concept design and detailed design. Product architectures are known to have profound impacts on company resources and hence it is therefore necessary to understand the implications of resource changes much before the detailed design is materialized. This work proposes a two step methodology to compute the reusability/commonality and the associated implication indices based on the global and detailed attributes of the conceptual and structural architectures. An illustrative example of a computer mouse family is used to demonstrate the working of the proposed methodology"--Abstract, leaf iv. |
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