Product Architecture Derivation Methodology Based on Multi-Objective Design Structure Matrix Integration and Supply Chain Evaluation

Companies dealing with industrial products, such as automobiles and laptops, should develop low-cost products with long-term high performance, low environmental load, and long lifespans to achieve a sustainable society. Thus, it is necessary to realize a product architecture in which the products can be easily upgraded and repaired by encouraging various suppliers to participate in the economic sphere of the products by promoting the standardization of components through an appropriate product modularization. In conventional module design, research focuses on reducing development lead time through the common use of components and on deriving appropriate product architecture by creating a design structure matrix based on the functionality of the product. Studies have also been conducted to derive an appropriate supply chain by considering the locations of the production and assembly sites of individual modules. However, few studies have been conducted on the consistent process from the derivation of product architecture candidates to the evaluation of their supply chains. Therefore, in this study, a design structure matrix, defined from multiple perspectives related to product functionality, is used to derive architecture candidates that consider the feasibility of products. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of supply chain management and propose a method that derives product architectures that consider sustainability and their supply chains by comprehensively evaluating product architecture candidates and their supply chains based on quality, cost, lead time, and environmental load. The proposed method is applied to a modularization problem of laptops, and a design structure matrix is created from five different perspectives: size effect, contact effect, power, information, and heat, and two product architecture candidates are derived. The results of the supply chain evaluation of the derived product architectures confirm that it is possible to propose an appropriate product architecture and its supply chain combination to the designer.