In today's business environment, the trend towards more product variety and customization is unbroken. Due to this development, the need of agile and reconfigurable production systems emerged to cope with various products and product families. To design and optimize production systems as well as to choose the optimal product matches, product analysis methods are needed. Indeed, most of the known methods aim to analyze a product or one product family on the physical level. Different product

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... ies, however, may differ largely in terms of the number and nature of components. This fact impedes an efficient comparison and choice of appropriate product family combinations for the production system. A new methodology is proposed to analyze existing products in view of their functional and physical architecture. The aim is to cluster these products in new assembly oriented product families for the optimization of existing assembly lines and the creation of future reconfigurable assembly systems. Based on Datum Flow Chain, the physical structure of the products is analyzed. Functional subassemblies are identified, and a functional analysis is performed. Moreover, a hybrid functional and physical architecture graph (HyFPAG) is the output which depicts the similarity between product families by providing design support to both, production system planners and product designers. An illustrative example of a nail-clipper is used to explain the proposed methodology. An industrial case study on two product families of steering columns of thyssenkrupp Presta France is then carried out to give a first industrial evaluation of the proposed approach. Abstract Value Stream Design (VSD) is a widely used approach to rearrange the value stream by creating an ideal future state. In case the design process results in multiple value stream alternatives, the planner might be confronted with a multi-objective decision problem. The target of this paper is to research key performance indicators (KPIs) and assessment approaches that are linked to value stream management and to thus develop an assessment tool that can be used to compare value stream design alternatives. For that purpose, a literature review has been carried out. The identified system-related KPIs are classified into the categories flexibility, cost efficiency, and flow. The assessment approaches are described with respect to their function, their application in the analyzed literature, and the scope that the approach is taking into account. After all, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is selected as a well-suiting method to compare value stream alternatives in a flexible and comprehensible manner. TOPSIS is able to consider any desired kind or number of KPIs. The presented approach is evaluated in a value stream design project at the process learning factory CiP (Center for industrial Productivity) of the Institute of Production Management, Technology and Machine Tools (PTW) at the TU Darmstadt. Abstract Value Stream Design (VSD) is a widely used approach to rearrange the value stream by creating an ideal future state. In case the design process results in multiple value stream alternatives, the planner might be confronted with a multi-objective decision problem. The target of this paper is to research key performance indicators (KPIs) and assessment approaches that are linked to value stream management and to thus develop an assessment tool that can be used to compare value stream design alternatives. For that purpose, a literature review has been carried out. The identified system-related KPIs are classified into the categories flexibility, cost efficiency, and flow. The assessment approaches are described with respect to their function, their application in the analyzed literature, and the scope that the approach is taking into account. After all, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is selected as a well-suiting method to compare value stream alternatives in a flexible and comprehensible manner. TOPSIS is able to consider any desired kind or number of KPIs. The presented approach is evaluated in a value stream design project at the process learning factory CiP (Center for industrial Productivity) of the Institute of Production Management, Technology and Machine Tools (PTW) at the TU Darmstadt.