COMMONALITY AND PRODUCT FAMILY DESIGN INTEGRATED WITH INVENTORY DECISIONS

摘要

Commonality or the use of the same components among products in a product family has been considered an effective approach to designing a product family; however, simultaneous optimization of commonality, product family design, and inventory decisions has not been comprehensively studied. In this paper, we propose a framework to simultaneously optimize commonality, product family design, and inventory decisions by incorporating inventory-related costs in the profit formula. Design of beverage containers is used as an illustrative example to demonstrate the proposed framework.