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Research Objective:

Modular product family architecture (PFA) can empower manufacturers to deal with diversified demand while causing less environmental damage. In this context, a manufacturer's PFA decisions must be considered with the procurement and manufacturing strategy in terms of granularity (level of detail), interface (attachment, spatial, transfer, etc.), and degree of modularity (i.e., number and size of modules) that received scant attention. Despite its advantages, however, the prevailing practice of PFA is based on architectural modularity irrespective of the interface requirements for an efficient supply chain. Therefore, components are assumed to have equal and/or fixed connection values, thereby overlooking the impact of the level of interdependency on the formation of PFA. Furthermore, the general approach of selecting suppliers and/or manufacturing processes for supply chain architecture is predicated on the minimum cost, rendering the benefit of modularity ineffective. Therefore, the resultant modular product architecture often reduces design robustness and increases complexity for product manufacturing and recovery (modular recycling).

Furthermore, business firms nowadays work in a decentralised manner where product and supply chain problems have high-dimensional decision variables, objectives, and constraints. In this context, the single 'controller' all-in-one (AIO) optimisation model does not reflect the real-life situation of dealing with conflicting goals. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a hierarchical optimisation model of modular product family and supply chain concurrently to deal with diversified market demands cost-effectively.Ìý

This research is expected to determine the optimal granularity of modules under the coherent framework of architectural and interface modularity, which is often widely different. These will ensure modules with higher commonality are shared among product variants and lower interface complexity to facilitate the manufacturing and recovery process. This research will interactively and hierarchically optimise commonality and cost to ensure coherence and integrity between product design and the supply chain. This research also investigates the contribution of modular product design to the sustainability characteristics of the supply chain (ensure cost-effective modular design with the actual interrelationship between components, promote modular recycling, reduce middle-age discarding of products, and provide functional modules for product upgrading, and so on).

Project start date:Ìý11 October, 2019.

Expected completion date:Ìý2 April, 2023.Ìý
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Achievements:Ìý

• One journal paper: Hossain, M.S., Chakrabortty, R.K., El Sawah, S. and Ryan, M.J., 2021. Sustainable modular product architecture design by Bi-level leader-follower joint optimisation with switching-based meta-heuristic algorithm. Journal of Cleaner Production, 306, p.127108.
• One journal paper under review