Platform-based product family has been proven an effective strategy to economically provide wide market coverage. However, two practical platform design issues need to be properly handled: (1) commonized components require over-design of features that drives capability waste and additional costs with regard to the lower end product variants, and (2) commonization pattern of components is constrained by couplings of the base platform architecture. This research attempts to present a generic approach for the optimal platform design that treats commonization of components in a hierarchic manner under hybrid modular architecture. Three major sections are included: (1) identification of hidden interface costs defined by the architectural couplings, (2) modeling of hierarchic sharing relationship of commonized components across product variants, and (3) configuration of the hierarchic components platform for the lowest total production cost. Finally, a family of cordless drills targeting a series of rated output torques is employed to demonstrate the proposed approach.
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