A component selection model for product design

Product design teams often aim to streamline product structures by standardising products' components and their features in order to reduce operations cost and improve productivity. We examine the notion of standardisation of components in product design by formulating a component selection model for the purpose of profit maximisation. The mathematical model proposed in this paper falls under the category of non-linear integer programming, and takes into account revenue, production and inventory costs. Our parametric analysis of a case example concludes that full commonality of components among products does not always maximise profit; furthermore, the optimal solution space is bounded by the minimal-component/minimal-feature and maximal-component/maximal-features cases. The conditions under which these design solutions perform well are identified.