Designing an Optimal Modular-Based Product Family Under Intellectual Property and Sustainability Considerations

With the rapid development of new technology and the growing global competition in industry, it is essential for companies to protect their sensitive product designs and technologies. To ensure that their systems are not exploited by potential patent infringers, original equipment manufacturers often apply physical attributes and/or reduce commonality within a product family to prevent easy reusing and recovering. Yet, these design strategies are key barriers to the sustainable recovery and recycling of products. To address these trade-offs, this paper proposes a stepwise methodology to identify the sustainable optimal product family architecture design while protecting intellectual property on sensitive parts or modules. The developed approach notably allows the selection of suitable and sustainable candidates to share among products, taking into account the cost-benefit of commonality within the product family. To demonstrate and test the proposed methodology, a case study is performed with a printer-product family. Environmental savings resulting from the new modular-based architecture obtained for this product family are quantified and discussed.