Designing evolving families of products using the utility-based compromise decision support problem

By designing families of products based on product platforms, many companies are providing product variety efficiently and effectively and facilitating the development of an overall product development strategy. An important factor in product development is the evolution of a family of products in response to changing technologies, market demands, competitive pressures and other factors. In this paper, we present a method for designing product platforms for an evolving product family that meets changing performance requirements with an expanding portfolio of products. The method is based on the utility-based compromise Decision Support Problem – a multiobjective decision support model with an objective function derived from utility theory. With this method, a designer can balance multiple, nondeterministic objectives in product platform design and consider explicitly the evolution of platform-based families of products in response to shifting performance targets. We apply this method to an example study of product platform design for an expanding family of absorption chillers.