A method for architecting product platforms withan application to interplanetary mission design

Abstract

Consider a group of products sharing common parts andassemblies. The products in question we call a product family,and the common elements, the platform. A platformarchitecture is the set of selection and configuration choicesshared among multiple products. We present a method fordesigning product platforms that takes into consideration boththe performance requirements as well as the cost of the productfamily. The definition of a product platform is formulated as ageneral optimization problem in which the advantages ofdesigning a common base must be balanced against theconstraints of the individual product variants and of the wholefamily. This optimization approach has been implemented asan ..