Market-driven modularity: an empirical application in the design of a family of autonomous mobile palletizers

Designing product families is an enabling strategy for mass customization. In general, there are four prevalent classes of problems when designing product families: (i) product family positioning; (ii) customer preferences modeling; (iii) product family modeling; and (iv) product family configuration. Although these classes are interwoven through design problems stemming from marketing, engineering, and economic areas, they are rarely handled together in product family design methods. The lack of a systemic, integrated design perspective may lead to locally optimal solutions and ultimately result in product families not making the economic benefits of customization worthwhile. Over the years, some methods have attempted to overcome this absence of holistic design view. However, because they are restricted to theoretical levels or lack detailed applications, their practical implementation is often not possible. To bridge the pathway between theory and practical implementation, this paper uses the market-driven modularity (MDM) method to design a family of autonomous mobile palletizers economically oriented to market requirements. The empirical application of the method points out the palletizers family as being economically feasible. Furthermore, it also indicates which modules should be developed in successive design phases, as well as reveal the definition of the product family structure as the MDM’s outcome that is more sensitive to the variation of parameters/variables composing the configuration model. The main contribution of this work lies in the presentation of practical implementation details of the MDM method, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been reported since its proposition.