A NETWORK BASED DYNAMIC MODEL FOR PRODUCT FAMILY EVOLUTION

摘要

Products evolve over time to follow new customer needs and technologies. Although the proper estimation of future products has been regarded as a critical issue for business success, it has not been widely discussed in an analytical way. Focusing on the evolution of a product family, this paper aims to develop a dynamic model which can effectively show the structural changes of a product family over time. The proposed model is based on a network representing the structural architecture of a product family. This model employs the concept of Fitness Model, where nodes in a certain system have their own fitness values to represent the degree of gaining edges with new nodes. The dynamic model proposed in this paper would be a basis for the estimation of product family evolution; it is potentially effective to simulate possible future structures of a product family according to different platform leveraging strategies.