Abstract
The issue of product families and product platforms have gained an increased interest both in academia and industry. The concept of commonality is often mentioned within this framework. However, commonality may occur at different levels of abstraction, commonality of functions or parts, and at different levels of detail, commonality of modules or parts. This paper presents a literature survey of related research on product families, product structuring and measurements associated to those areas, in order to clarify what to consider when measuring commonality. The result is a framework for measuring commonality. Firstly, there is a need to clarify the kind of commonality measured, that is, on what architectural and structural level (level of abstraction and level of detail) is the commonality measured. Secondly, there is also a need to clarify what reference that is used for calculating the commonality. The concepts of product family commonality and product variant commonality are introduced to distinguish the reference for calculating the commonality.
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Stake, R.B. (2001). A Framework for Evaluating Commonality. In: Riitahuhta, A., Pulkkinen, A. (eds) Design for Configuration. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56905-0_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-56905-0_14
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