A green product family design method considering the effect of production volume

Abstract

A product family is a set of similar products obtained from a common platform. Products in a product family are linked with each other by the emergent attributes (such as the commonalty). The commonality of a product family affects the production volume of sharing components, and furthermore the production volume affects the cost of manufacturing, reuse, and recycling and so on. The green design methods for a single product are not able to handle a product family, so a new systematic green product family design method needs to develop. To adapt and combine product family design and product green design is the main research idea of this paper. In this paper, product family design and green design are modified with consideration of production volume. Green modules are identified by a fuzzy clustering method A case study of a green fridge family is provided to validate our design method.