Standardizing components for product family configuration design

Configuration design for product families plays a very important role in mass customization. It focuses on the arrangements of components or modules in products and their connections and relationships. During the implementation of configuration design, it is necessary to reduce the varieties and the amounts of components and share common components among many products. The major benefits are lessened design efforts and reduced costs. Therefore, this paper presents an approach to standardize components of a product family. Firstly, a method for form feature modeling of components is discussed. This method provides a uniform representation to components and facilitates the similarity analysis among their features. Secondly, main feature architectures and auxiliary feature architectures of a family of components are standardized, based on the similarity analysis. The algorithms of standardization are identified as well as. Finally, a case for standardizing components of an auto-body family is used to demonstrate the validity of this approach. The varieties of components can be reduced effectively, by using this approach.