The rationale of developing product families with respect to mass customization has been well recognized in both industry and academia. This paper investigates the concept of architecture of product family (APF). Fundamental issues underlying the APF are discussed. Common bases, differentiation enablers and configuration mechanisms from both sales and engineering views are defined. Variety generation methods with regard to producing custom products based on the modular product architecture are introduced. To represent a family of products instead of a collection of individual products, a general product structure (GPS) is proposed. Accordingly, family based product design is studied. The APF and the associated GPS capture both compositional and generative aspects of product family design, thus providing the constructs for generating product variants automatically.
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