A Study on Product Association Modeling in Collaborative Product Design

Many customers are no longer satisfied with mass-produced products; they are demanding customization and rapid delivery of innovative products. A new category of software, Collaborative Product Design (CPD), uses Internet technology to deliver product innovation at Internet speed and tie together product design, engineering, marketing, and customers into a global knowledge net. CPD enables organizations to quickly respond to the market change, so it has become increasingly important. Though CPD permits manufactures to significantly improve the core processes of the complete product life cycle, its information system will store a large number of product data in database day by day. R&D engineers are difficult to retrieve useful design data to cope with customers’ demand. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to apply the association rule that belongs to one of the data mining techniques to analyze the product feature association. This research also applies object-oriented technique of Unified Modeling Language, (UML) to establish a reference model integrated with CPD product feature association rules. In the end, this research cites an example of cellular phone model design and applies association rule technique to analyze product feature association rule of cellular phones. The results help cellular phone developers designing good products to conform to customers’ different demands.