【正文】
satisfy all the market segments. Mixed market segment and modular design strategies Market segment and modular design strategies can be mixed in order to reach a promise between overequipment costs, oversatisfaction costs and management costs. In a market segment oriented strategy, some market segments have mon service levels for several requirements. A designer may be interested in developing variants for these market segments that share mon modular ponents. Reciprocally, during a modular design strategy a designer can ?nd cheaper to design a module that simultaneously ful?lls a subset of functional requirements. Therefore, the designer should de?ne market segments and thus module variants for this subset of customer requirements. These approaches can be frequently observed in various markets. For instance, household electrical appliance families are usually deposed into market segments。 whether to oversatisfy a service level with a module designed for a higher service level。 to select a variant among the designed ones for the not oversatis?ed market segments. in the example, an extreme decision can be to only manufacture either Variant or Variant in order to satisfy all the market segments. Modular design strategy The second strategy aims at adopting modular principles. This strategy appears to be essential in order to design masscustomizable products . The principle is to design at least one module variant per functional requirement and per service level so that any demand can be ful?lled with the assembly of the desired module variants. This modular principle forces: (i) to design a standard platform on which any modular variant can be assembled。 whether to oversatisfy a market segment with a variant designed for an upper market segment。 0 service level n). These service levels distinguish levels of plexity and cost in order to obtain the function. For example, the service levels of the function ‘‘car window lifter’’ can vary from ‘‘manual lifter’’ up to ‘‘electrical lifter with alarm and pinch protection’’. Consequently, the customer diversity es from the binatory gathering all the service levels relevant to the multiple requirements: the set{(requirement, service level)} de?nes the market needs that must be covered by the product family. From the product point of view, a product family is a set of physical product variants and is de?ned in order to ful?ll the market needs. A product variant ful?lls all of the requirements with a given speci?c service level. Moreover, a product variant is split up into ponents based on its billofmaterials. The physical diversity usually refers to the cardinal of this product family or to the cardinal of the set of we consider an order relation between the service levels of each requirement, a partial order relation also exists between the product variants within a product family: a Variant V1 is greater than a Variant V2, if,for each requirement, the service level of V1 is greater than the service level of V2. Now, let us consider a given customer demand de?ned by a set of service levels, one per functional requirement: demand = {(requirement, demanded service level)}. There may not exist in the product family a product that exactly matches the demanded service levels. But the interest of the producer remains to satisfy this demand at the lowest cost and thus as close as possible to the demanded service levels. Consequently, the demand will be ful?lled by the smallest variant (in the sense of the partial relation of order)that oversatis?es all the demanded service levels. Another consequence is that a product family must at least contain one variant that exactly matches all the functional requirements at the maximal service level so that any demand can be oversatis?ed by this variant. This means that it is not necessary to manufacture all the possible variants: