A New Design for Production (DFP) Methodology with Two Case Studies

Concurrent engineering (CE) design demands the consideration of product life cycle issues in the early product design stage. Among various life cycle issues, this work concentrates on production and how to optimize a product design to minimize its production costs. This paper proposes the use of cost as a measure of the productivity and defines Design for Production (DFP) as methods that lead to a product design with minimum production costs while satisfying all the functional requirements. Based on this definition, this work proposes a DFP methodology. The novelty of this methodology lies on three aspects (1) the use of the Operation-Based Costing (OBC) method to measure productivity, (2) the identification of relations and boundaries between product design and production activities, and (3) the integration of product design, production cost estimation, and metamodeling-based optimization to search for the optimal product design. The proposed DFP methodology has been applied to the optimal design of two industry products, an industrial silencer and a linear air diffuser. The results from these studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, whose assumptions and limitations are also elaborated.