Toward a function-based IT platform for variants redesign of household appliances

Modular product design is an efficient strategy to let manufacturing companies meet the customers’ requirements by offering
a wide variety and customization of products and significantly saving time and cost during engineering and production
(Fei et al., 2011). Despite numerous approaches for function modeling and modular product design (Srinivasan et al., 2012;
Eckert, 2013; Vermaas, 2013) that have been developed in the last decades, carrying out an efficient product variants’ design
process is still an open issue for many manufacturing companies. The proposed approaches offer numerous ways to
model information about product functionality, but each approach is useful and particularly well suited for different applications
and domains (Summers et al., 2013). The present research compares the existing approaches for product variants
design and defines a function-based model to support product design and redesign according to a modular framework, merging
qualitative technical issues with business-oriented evaluation. Such a framework has been used to develop a multiuser IT
platform, composed of a knowledge-based engine and four different tools to support designers and engineers in product
variants creation, management, and configuration, from product functional modeling to cost estimation and life cycle assessment.
The proposed model has been tested on industrial cases in the context of household appliances. Experimental
results demonstrates that, after a preliminary context analysis and a proper knowledge base creation, such a model supports
a more conscious decision-making and promote collaboration within an interdisciplinary design team. Finally, the case study
shows the necessity, but in the meanwhile the insufficiency, of a functional decomposition as the only representation
viewpoint.