Innovation Toolkit for identification of the Optimal Module Options in Open Platform Architecture Products
DS 91: Proceedings of NordDesign 2018, Linköping, Sweden, 14th - 17th August 2018
Year: 2018
Editor: Ekströmer, Philip; Schütte, Simon and Ölvander, Johan
Author: Sikhwal, Ravi K; Childs, Peter R N
Series: NordDESIGN
Institution: Imperial College London
ISBN: 978-91-7685-185-2
Abstract
Open platform architecture products (OPAP) are the key enablers for Product design for Mass Individualisation. It is a new product design paradigm that comprises an open hardware platform, mass-produced by large manufacturers and multiple independent modules, invented and produced by other smaller companies and by the end-user that are integrated with the platform. It gives freedom to end-users to integrate different modules into the platform as per their choice. This type of product integration will be engaged with by the all actors involved in the design and aims to help them to be more creative and innovative. The end product will be highly individualised and technologically advanced. Based on explorative literature analysis, with practical insights from an industrial questionnaire survey, an Innovation toolkit for the end-user has been developed. The Innovation toolkit provides a mean of selecting an optimal module option for each module which will be integrated on the hardware platform. The design of the Innovation toolkit for OPAP has been approached in three different steps: Modelling of OPAP, Modelling of evaluation measures and evaluation indices with end-user preferences and Identification of the optimal module options. In this work, variations in module options for a given module are modelled by an AND-OR tree and parameters of the nodes in this tree. Different module options for the selected module are evaluated by various evaluation measures. These evaluation measures are converted into comparable customer satisfaction indices. The optimal OPAP is identified by constrained optimisation of the overall customer satisfaction index. Two case studies have been presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the introduced Innovation toolkit. These case studies illustrate that the Innovation toolkit can readily be applied to these types of product development to obtain a highly individualised OPAP with optimised module options
Keywords: Design optimisation, innovation toolkit, mass individualisation, open platform architecture products.