Evaluation of product performance in product family design re-use

Design re-use is essential to competitive and sustainable product development. In product family design, re-use leads to savings in resources and ensures sustainable production. However, a complete design re-use process model for product family design has not been well defined. Moreover, the evaluation of product performance based on component-level re-use has been inadequate, failing to explore the effective application of design re-use in product family design. This paper presents a product family design re-use ( PFDR) methodology to address these deficiencies. A three-stage process model is proposed to manage the design processes. The information content assessment ( ICA) method is proposed for product performance evaluation. This method defines the logical steps to compute the information content that is used as a uniform, dimensionless metric of product performance. In a case study, a product family of cellular phones were developed using this design re-use methodology. It is demonstrated that the design re-use methodology proposed in this paper can effectively manage the product family design processes, and the ICA method provides a useful way for performance evaluation.