Design rationale and system description aspects in product platform design: Focusing reuse in the design lifecycle phase

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Abstract
One key to efficient and effective reuse in product-developing companies is platform-based design. Future platforms need to more efficiently deal with: concurrency, information-rich designs and fast realization of design derivates. This calls for new ways to describe platform-based designs. The configurable component framework is intended to support concurrent, complex, and variant-rich system design considering the complete product life cycle. This article presents case studies where an extended function-means model, acting as a design rationale, is incorporated into the configurable component concept. This includes an adaptation to handle design bandwidth, a more transparent and explicit constraint handling, and the composition of a system design rationale based on multiple function-means models. This approach enables the description of complex, encapsulated configurable systems composed using multiple (sub) systems and supports concurrent engineering in a supply chain.