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Lei, Ningrong; Moon, Seung Ki; Rosen, David W.

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The paper highlights the opportunities for Additive Manufacturing (AM) based product family design to operate in a much broader design space that is free from constraints which arise in traditional product family designs from finding a compromise between commonality and performance. The proposed method starts by establishing design requirements and defining the customization space. Subsequently a utility-based objective function is employed to optimize individual products for multiple objectives. The final step identifies potential commonalities that can be exploited in order to reduce the manufacturing cost. We incorporate an AM cost model into the product family design process and to explore the effects of eliminating the commonality requirement. To show the feasibility of the method, a family of finger pumps is investigated. The results show a significant performance improvement when compared to conventional product family design methods. The results also show that, with the advantages of AM, the customization cost is consistently low. These results provide confidence that the proposed method yields affordable customization without compromising individual product performances.

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Optimisation, Product Modelling, Product Families, Additive Manufacturing, Decision Making