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Nowadays, product development is challenged by increasing system complexity and stringent time-to-market. To handle the demanding market requirements, knowledge from prior product generations is used to derive new, but partially similar product versions. The concept of product generation engineering, hence, allows manufacturers to release high-quality products within short development times. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to evaluate the similarity of two product implementations based on the concept of the Hamming distance. This allows the usage of similarity information in various heuristics as well as in strategies and thus, to improve the product design process. In a wide set of cases, we investigate the quality and similarity of design points. In the experiments, the use of strategies leads to significantly short searching times, but also tends to be too restrictive in certain cases. Simultaneously, the quality of the solutions found in the heuristic design space exploration has been shown to be as good or better than for the search from scratch and considerably closer solutions as part of the non-dominated solution front have been found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]