| Abstract: | This paper examines the reduction in complexity of a product family through product design. By leveraging the commonalities among products in a family, the decision support methodology presented in the paper helps choose components and suppliers that minimize the sum of design, procurement, and usage costs. The problem of integrated component and supplier selection is conceptualized and formulated as an integer-programming model. Analysis of the model yields two properties, complete and continuous replacement, which form the basis of a heuristic procedure. Computational tests show that the heuristic provides results close to the optimal solution and can be used for selecting components and suppliers. Application of the model to an industrial problem is discussed. |
