Design Reuse Methodology for Product Family Design

This paper presents a design reuse methodology to facilitate product family design. Three major processes are defined, namely, information modelling, information processing, and solution synthesis and evaluation. The information content assessment (ICA) method is proposed for solution evaluation. This method defines logical steps to compute the information content that is used as a uniform, dimensionless metric of product performances. In a case study, product families of the cellular phone were developed using the design reuse methodology. It is demonstrated that the design reuse method proposed in this paper can effectively manage the product family design processes, and the ICA method provides a useful way for performance evaluation.