A product platform is a set of common components, modules or parts from which a stream of derivative products can be created. Product platform design requires selection of the shared parts and assessment of the potential sacrifices in individual product performance that result from parts sharing. A multicriteria optimization problem can be formulated to study such decisions in a quantitative manner at the product performance level. Studying the Pareto sets that correspond to various derivative products leads to a systematic methodology for design decision making. A brad-nail gun is used to illustrate the concepts presented.
