Development of product platforms, modules and common components is recognised in both industry and academia as a means of meeting changing customer needs within reasonable cost and time parameters. Identifying candidate parts to make common across different product portfolios is a complex task. This paper investigates current issues of product platform and modularity development, and focuses on searching for commonality opportunities. The concept of a commonality opportunity search algorithm (COSA) is introduced as a methodology to quickly identify cost efficient commonality opportunities. COSA streamlines the process of searching thousands of parts in company databases to determine common bases and individual parts differentiation based on available data. The analysed data was collected from numerous departments, which allows for nominating commonality opportunities based on global company strategy rather than on the needs of any individual department. An industrial example is presented to illustrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed methodology.

中文翻译：

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工业产品组合中的公共机会搜索

产品平台，模块和通用组件的开发在业界和学术界都被认可为一种在合理的成本和时间参数内满足不断变化的客户需求的方法。确定要在不同产品组合中通用的候选零件是一项复杂的任务。本文调查了产品平台和模块化开发的当前问题，并将重点放在寻找通用性机会上。引入了公共机会搜索算法（COSA）的概念，作为一种快速识别具有成本效益的公共机会的方法。COSA简化了在公司数据库中搜索成千上万个零件的过程，以根据可用数据确定通用基础和单个零件差异。分析的数据是从多个部门收集的，这样就可以根据全球公司战略而不是任何部门的需求来提名共同性机会。给出了一个工业实例来说明所提出方法的可行性和潜力。