Designing Multi-Technological Resilient Objects in Product Platforms

Uncertainty about the market, environment, and technological landscape of the future challenges the ways companies utilize the notion of “product platforms” to gain efficiency during development and production. This paper reviews design approaches to cope with uncertainties and highlights the benefit of designing a platform to enable “resilience” to deal with uncertain situation without the need to change the structure or configuration of the product platform. To achieve resilience, the paper proposes to introduce “resilient objects” in regions of the product platform that are likely to be most affected by change. Resilient design objects are already common in practice, such as a spring-damper system in mechanical systems. However, since product platform are multi-technological, this paper proposes a way of representing generic resilient objects (along five different design domains) for multi-technological systems. This proposal is supported by illustrative examples. Future research opportunities are identified around extending the matrix of generic multi-technological resilient objects, and defining a systematic method to design, select and evaluate which resilient objects are more valuable to be inserted in specific regions of the product platform.