Product family design and product configuration based on data mining technology is identified as an intelligent and automated means to improve the efficiency of product development. However, few of previous literatures have proposed systematic product family design method based on data mining technology. To make up for this deficiency, this research put forward a systematic data-mining-based method for product family design and product configuration. First, the customer requirement information and product engineering information in the historical order are formatted into structural data. Second, principal component analysis is performed on historical orders to extract the customers' differentiated needs. Third, association rule algorithm is introduced to mine the rules between differentiated needs and module instances in the historical orders, thus obtained the configuration knowledge between customer needs and product engineer. Forth, the mined rules are used to construct association rule-based classifier (CBA) that is employed to sort out the best product configuration schemes as popular product variants. Fifth, sequence alignment technique is employed to identify modules for popular product variants, so that the module instances are divided into optional, common and special module, respectively, thereby the product platform is generated based on common modules. Finally, according to new customer needs, the CBA classifier is used to recommend the best configuration schemes, and then popular product variants are configured based on the product platform. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated by the product family design example of desktop computer hosts.

基于数据挖掘技术的产品系列设计和产品配置被认为是提高产品开发效率的智能和自动化手段。然而，很少有文献提出基于数据挖掘技术的系统的产品族设计方法。为了弥补这一不足，本研究提出了一种基于系统的数据挖掘的产品系列设计和产品配置方法。首先，将历史订单中的客户需求信息和产品工程信息格式化为结构数据。其次，对历史订单进行主成分分析，以提取客户的差异需求。第三，引入关联规则算法来挖掘历史需求中区分需求和模块实例之间的规则，从而获得了客户需求和产品工程师之间的配置知识。第四，挖掘的规则用于构造基于关联规则的分类器（CBA），该分类器用于将最佳产品配置方案分类为流行的产品变体。第五，采用序列比对技术识别流行产品的模块，将模块实例分别划分为可选模块，通用模块和特殊模块，从而基于通用模块生成产品平台。最后，根据新客户的需求，使用CBA分类器推荐最佳配置方案，然后根据产品平台配置流行的产品变型。台式计算机主机的产品系列设计实例证明了该方法的可行性。