Consider a group of products sharing common parts and assemblies. The products in question we call a product family, and the common elements, the platform. A platform architecture is the set of selection and configuration choices shared among multiple products. We present a method for designing product platforms that takes into consideration both the performance requirements as well as the cost of the product family. The definition of a product platform is formulated as a general optimization problem in which the advantages of designing a common base must be balanced against the constraints of the individual product variants and of the whole family. This optimization approach has been implemented as an interactive multi-team-based negotiation model for designing an interplanetary spacecraft platform and its supported family variants. The model is used to identify possible subsystems of each spacecraft that could be made common to all or some of the missions, and the impact of architecture decisions on the performance of the product family.
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