Development of a methodology for the systematic planning and development of product architectures through release management

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Günther Schuh
• Subject Area: Production Systems, Operations Management, Quality Management and Factory Planning ; Engineering Design, Machine Elements, Product Development
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269043381

Increasing international competition, as well as profound differences in the requirements of users results in many industries in rapidly growing variants. This has significant negative impact on the effort which have to be operated for ongoing costs of technical changes. In existing approaches to technical change management it is generally assumed that technical changes are always introduced directly, although empirical studies have shown that approximately 70% of the technical changes are not time-critical. For this reason, the central goal of this research project is to develop a methodology that enables a systematic control of an efficient and effective maintenance and development of modular product architectures with regard to occurring technical changes to ensure the long-term success of a product architecture. The central issue is the balancing of the negative consequences of the introduction of a technical change in a modular product structure in terms of the potential loss of economies of scale on the one hand and the possible delay in innovation and thus the customer value in shifting the launch date on the other.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants