A proposed index to assess commonality among aircraft product families

Abstract

Abstract Market increasing competition escalate the challenges facing aeronautics companies to satisfy the diversity of aircrafts applications while keeping design and manufacturing cost of Aircrafts as low as possible. Modularity and commonality in Aircrafts design have been recognized as solution for the stated challenge. Commonality in aeronautics result in offering different aircrafts models at lower costs that broader the use of aircrafts. For modular product design the need to assess the degree of modularity or commonality arises, and many researchers have been motivated for designing various commonality indices for specific focus to assess commonality to evaluate the benefits and compare between the degree of commonality among various product families. This paper proposes new commonality index within design concern that take into account products production quantities. Commonality is assessed for different products quantities patterns using one of previous design concern index (e.g DCI) and using developed CPF. CPF give consistent commonality assessment unlike any design focus commonality index such DCI. Consequently, it is concluded that commonality assessment must be based on the actual production quantity of common modules used unlike previous approaches that based their commonality assessment on the number of times common modules can be used in the fixed design of products within product family. Therefore, the developed index could assess the commonality across various Aircrafts product families more effectively than previous measures.