A developed products’ families commonality Index based on variants’ similarity.

Abstract

Abstract Commonality indices used to assess the shared features of product families are crucial tools for benchmarking and redesigning these families. They also play a significant role in optimizing manufacturing systems by adding or removing components/modules to product platforms during delayed customization stages. Although several indices have been developed by researchers to measure commonality across product family variants, these indices are often only suitable for specific applications with specific configurations. In the present research, a new commonality index has been developed based on the similarity features of each pair of variants within a product family. The developed index is useful for clustering family variants into subfamilies, each with high components’ sharing ratio, facilitating the design of necessary product platform/s for delayed customization manufacturing systems. The results of applying this developed index to determine commonality across product family variants were compared with those obtained from several known commonality indices. The new index proved to be effective and sensitive in distinguishing between the commonalities of different product families. Additionally, the index was found to be effective in categorizing products into homogeneous families, grouping variants that share certain similarities and commonality features.