ANP-GP approach for product variety design

Developing product variety under a robust platform provides a company with an important competitive advantage. The competitive benefits include reducing engineering costs and time to market, extending product portfolios and expanding market share. This study illustrated an algorithm based design methodology for achieving optimal product architecture. The impact of customer requirements (CRs) and the interdependencies among the CRs and components should be considered when assessing the components that are the focus of redesign in market shifts. This paper employs the analytic network process (ANP) to fulfil this requirement. The goal programming (GP) approach that incorporates the results from the ANP is then is applied to select the variant components within budget limits. Therefore, this study investigates drivers of the component variations to ensure the redesigned parts meet the requirements of specialized niches in the segment markets. Finally, an example of coffee maker design is presented to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method.