Robust design of families of products with production modeling and evaluation

The effectiveness of manufacturing enterprises that compete with product fa milies can be leveraged through an appropriate standardization of component s. In this paper Mle examine how a robust standardization of components can be implemented in the early stages of design with an explicit evaluation o f the production system. The approach is based on (1) a mathematical formul ation of design decisions using the Compromise Decision Support Problem (DS P), which includes robustness considerations, and (2) modeling production s l systems as networks of response surfaces. This modeling method facilitate s evaluation of the impact of product design changes on the performance of the production system, thus enabling concurrent product-process design expl oration. We demonstrate the approach with a case study, namely, the design of an absorber-evaporator module for a family of absorption chillers.