Research on product family structure model for industrial design

To construct a product family structure model supporting industrial design, function differences of industrial design and engineering design were compared and studied. Then a multi-view structure model was proposed. This model included three views: General Structure View, Control Structure View and Storage Structure View. In the General Structure View, hierarchy structure of the whole view and property sheets of the nodes were adopted. This view defined concept structure of product family. Control Structure View was consisted of industrial design control elements and mapped to structure and element of the General Structure View, which defined the shape varying control strategy. In the Storage Structure View, physical parts vs. logical components, composition-relationship vs. reference-relationship and other information organizations and storage methods were proposed to efficiently digitalize the model. A complete structure model of product family industrial design was formed based on synthesis of these three views, and a case of cell phone product family was studied.