Flexible product platforms

The research contributes to the uncertainty management of engineering systems by proposing and demonstrating a way to implement flexible platform strategy to respond to future uncertainties. In today's competitive market, where market segments are becoming more fragmented, pressure to develop and market diverse sets of products is increasing. To meet such market needs and reduce production cost at the same time, product platform strategy has been implemented in several different industries. Using a core set of common platform elements and variant-specific unique elements, a family of products can be produced to satisfy various market segments. However, the growing cost of platform development and undesired side effects of the strategy (e.g. performance tradeoff, cannibalization) is forcing companies to design their platforms with flexibility, so they can accommodate product variants, differentiate these variants, and be economically flexible to respond to specified future uncertainties. This thesis introduces a design process to architect flexible product platforms. The proposed process is demonstrated in two automotive application case studies.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Suh, Eun Suk

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Olivier L. de Weck.

• Engineering Systems Division.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/33727

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/33727