In order to determine target market and price, and design products/components for a family of front-loading washing machines, the coordination for decision-making from the corporate level down to the product and ultimately component levels is required. However, existing design research for many products focuses on analyzing single or multiple disciplines, even though optimizing local performance does not guarantee minimizing total cost at the product line level or maximizing value at the company level. In this work, we apply a multi-level value-driven design (VDD) approach to optimize a family of front-loading washing machines using a discipline-based decomposition. The VDD solutions obtained using discipline-based decomposition (DD) are compared with those obtained using product-based decomposition (PD). Consequently, the multi-level VDD approach based on DD for the washer family provides better performance for attributes than PD, but we observed that DD for the washer family does not guarantee maximizing the value function compared to PD because of the larger numbers of subsystems and consistency-related variables. Ongoing and future work to address this problem are discussed.
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