DESIGN FOR VARIETY – EFFICIENT SUPPORT FOR DESIGN ENGINEERS
DS 48: Proceedings DESIGN 2008, the 10th International Design Conference, Dubrovnik, Croatia
Year: 2008
Editor: Marjanovic D., Storga M., Pavkovic N., Bojcetic N.
Author: Kipp, T.; Krause, D.
Section: Design for X
Page(s): 425 - 432
Abstract
The development of products with many variants is a challenge getting increasingly important due to the trend of individualisation. Product development meets this challenge generally with specific product architectures, e.g. modular or platform architectures. However beside its architecture the design of a product affects significantly the expenses of the creation of new variants.
Therefore this contribution identifies design principles supporting the simple and cost efficient generation of product variants. To make these principles available for design engineers in an efficient way, they are compiled as helpfully illustrated design guidelines. Finally the benefit of these guidelines is discussed on the basis of a real product example.
Keywords: variant, variety, complexity