SUMMARY

The use of product platforms facilitates product variety and reductions in cost and lead times, enabling companies to compete in the global marketplace. A common platform allows companies to generate variety by adding, removing, or substituting modules within products to target a specific market. Configuration design methods are used to identify product platforms based on a set of components and their relationships in a product. The physical locations and spatial requirements of components within a product can influence the physical layout of other members within the product family. This can lead to difficulty in obtaining the desired variety and spatial layout of components.

Methods of solving configuration design problems have been developed and utilize discrete mathematics and graph theory to model configuration problems from multiple viewpoints. The current viewpoints consider neither desires of the designer in regards to variety, nor the physical requirements of the product family in later design stages. The generation of product configurations is a combinatorial and discrete problem, while physical layout is combinatorial and algebraic. The work of this thesis seeks to address this problem through the consolidation of configuration design and object layout methods, to determine the effects of configuration design decisions on component layout.

This results in the development of design method to generate a product family with configuration constraints and the generation of common component layouts based on spatial constraints. This method facilitates product platform selection by determining if the designers desired configurations and layouts are feasible. To demonstrate the use of the methods presented in this thesis, as GUI-based software application was developed. This software implements the work of this thesis into a user-friendly program. The proposed method and the software are demonstrated through a series of examples.