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Platform Architectures (PA)
| Our Platform Architecture initiative (PA) has helped companies to determine optimal product families, and choose the best subsystems to be shared by products within the family. If a company produces only a few simple products, it can successfully develop each independently of the others. But as a company increases the number and complexity of its products, it maximizes effectiveness by evolving from a product-by-product approach to a system approach. The result is a family of products based on common technologies and subsystems.
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Decision Methodology for Product Platform Strategy
The objective of the current research is to formulate a rigorous
analytical decision methodology for product families that use common
platforms. A platform strategy is aggressively implemented by many manufacturing
industries to reduce time and cost in development, manufacturing, and
logistics. To effectively implement and execute the platform strategy,
many issues need to be addressed. Some of these issues are: the optimum
number of product platforms needed to cover a desired set of market segments;
the choice of an appropriate market leveraging strategy using the available
product platforms; selection of common components to be included in a
platform; decisions to merge, split, add, or remove existing product
platforms over time. A set of feasible solutions to these questions can
be obtained using a two level optimization approach. A platform architecture
optimization can be performed at the product family level using heuristic
algorithms, followed by more traditional optimization to maximize each
variant’s performance given the commonality constraint imposed
by the assigned platform. This project is sponsored by General Motors.
Research Faculty
Olivier de Weck
Initiative Leader
Assistant Professor
Engineering Systems Division
