Integrated design of production strategy and reuse scenario for product line development

One of the core problems of product line development is the coordination efforts of product builder and core-asset developer. More specifically, it is the integration of production strategy decision and core asset implemention scenario selection. In this paper, we have developed the CoFAQ (Cost Optimization under Functional And Quality goal satisfaction constraints) framework which provides a systematic mechanism for management to analyze all possible products and evaluate various reuse alternatives at the organizational level, based on an integrated decision model (IDM). The solution of CoFAQ is provided to assist decision-maker in optimizing design when developing a product line towards minimizing cost, while satisfying system functional and quality requirements to a certain degree. Considered the IDM model is NP-complete problem, a two-phased algorithm with heuristic (TPA) is developed to solve the model efficiently. Using the TPA, the IDM boils down to a weighted set covering problem for production strategy decision sub-problem (PSD) and knapsack problem for reuse scenario selection sub-problem (RSS).