An investigation on the network topology of an evolving product family structure and its robustness and complexity

Products continuously change over time through product innovations satisfying new customer needs and technologies. The successive emergence of new products within a product family can be considered as product family evolution that necessarily involves changes in a product family design structure. Although product family design has been widely discussed in the extant literature, inherent evolving properties in a product family design structure have not been sufficiently explored in an analytical manner. To tackle this issue, this research aims to characterize underlying properties in an evolving product family structure based on a network science approach. First, a product family structure is represented as a network to describe relationships among the components of a product family structure. Then, topological properties and patterns in a product family structure network at each time period are investigated through a case study using the smartphone models of a major company. The results show that each product family structure network follows the topological properties observed in other real networks; the product family structure network evolves with both scale-free and small-world properties and with common and specific motifs during each specific time duration. Also, findings from this study suggest that a design structure with a scale-free network topology with commonality can have topological robustness due to a decrease in structural complexity.