Abstract

Development of platforms for products has proven a successful way to manage and address several challenges related to increasing variety and accelerating product development cycles. Thus, it is natural to assume that platforms may facilitate similar benefits for manufacturing systems, as they are both technical systems. Production and manufacturing systems platform development is, however, still an area of research lacking maturity. Development of platforms in this field comes with a set of challenges not necessarily found in product platform development. Looking towards other fields of research or science may be necessary to address these challenges. This paper aims to study challenges related to production and manufacturing systems platform development and describe how these have been addressed. It does so through an evolving case study based on four projects with an industrial collaborator. This leads to setting the stage for future research on production platforms.

Highlights

  • With increasing product variety, shortened development lifecycles and accelerated time-to-market, manufacturers’ ability to adapt is being strained, and addressing this challenge is proving to be a difficult task [1]

  • This paper presents a series of challenges, lessons, and experiences on production platforms, structured as an evolving case study carried out over a period of three years

  • The company progressed through four projects for platform development

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Summary

Introduction

With increasing product variety, shortened development lifecycles and accelerated time-to-market, manufacturers’ ability to adapt is being strained, and addressing this challenge is proving to be a difficult task [1]. The standardisation, consistency and reusability of platforms, which has proven successful in managing product variety [2], is a seemingly attractive choice for managing production variety [3] Platforms incorporating these aspects in production and manufacturing systems are called production platforms, and can be utilised to achieve appropriate levels of changeability. For design of manufacturing systems utilising changeability (such as reconfigurable manufacturing), development and design of production platforms remains a challenge during the later design stages [6]. Concepts such as co-development [7], co-platforming [8] and, integrated product and production modelling [9, 10] are gaining traction. This highlights a need for coexisting product and production platforms

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