A Method for Green Modular Design Considering Product Platform Planning Strategy

Green modular product design plays one of the most important roles to create products with less environmental impact targeting the sustainable society. Nevertheless, traditional green modular design has the risk of losing the use of strategy of product platform planning. And this strategy is widely employed by company in order to shorten time to market and reduce costs. Aiming at the problem, a modular design method is proposed in this paper considering not only the environmental impact of product but also product platform planning strategy. The instability index of component is first presented to evaluate the change likelihood of component in future generations. Based on the instability index, the calculation method for the probability of product platform planning between product generations is illustrated. Next, a mathematical formulation for green modular design with consideration of product platform planning strategy is given. Moreover, for obtaining an optimal design scheme, a genetic algorithm is employed to conduct modular optimization. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a case study.