Components Clustering for Modular Product Design Using Network Flow Model

Modular product design has contributed to flexible product modification and development, production lead time reduction, and increasing product diversity. Modular product design aims to develop a product architecture that is composed of detachable modules. These modules are constructed by maximizing the similarity of components based on physical and functional interaction analysis among components. Accordingly, a systematic procedure for clustering the components, which is a main activity in modular product design, is proposed in this paper. The first phase in this procedure is to build a component-to-component correlation matrix by analyzing physical and functional interaction relations among the components. In the second phase, network flow modeling is applied to find clusters of components, maximizing their correlations. In the last phase, a network flow model formulated with linear programming is solved to find the clusters and to make them modular. Finally, the proposed procedure in this research and its application are illustrated with an example of modularization for a vacuum cleaner.

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