MULTI-LEVEL VALUE-DRIVEN DESIGN APPROACHES FOR PRODUCT FAMILY DESIGN

Companies usually launch families of products into the market to provide value to different segments based on different customer needs; however, most of the research on Value-Driven Design (VDD) in the literature has focused on modeling value functions and optimizing the design of single products, not families of products. In order to increase profit and minimize total cost for product design and manufacturing, VDD should be applicable to product family design. In this work, we propose a multi-level VDD approach for product family design by extending multidisciplinary design optimization methods. The multi-level VDD is applied to a family of front-loading washing machines to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. With this example, we demonstrate that design problems that optimize traditional objective functions (e.g., cost, performance) at each level do not necessarily maximize value when compared to an appropriate VDD formulation. On the other hand, when the value function is set as an objective function throughout the organization (company, product family, and product level), we find that the VDD formulation provides the best value. Future work based on these promising findings is also discussed.