Complex product configuration updating oriented by changing customer requirements

Abstract

Changes of customer requirements inevitably occur in the process of product design and manufacturing, which results in substantial costs in product development. Enterprises have to update product configuration schemes to meet new customer requirements and maintain competitiveness. Recent studies have attempted to solve this problem with the ‘two-stage’ model (optimisation of change propagation and update scheme). They have largely ignored the correlation between the two stages, which leads to extra costs in practice. Therefore, this paper proposes a master-slave coordinated optimisation model, in which the design of update scheme was the leader and the optimisation of change propagation path was the follower. The upper optimisation model was constructed to obtain a change propagation path with the minimum propagation range. And the lower optimisation model was constructed to obtain a product configuration update scheme with the highest satisfaction. Meanwhile, the diversity of the optimal update scheme from the lower model was fed back to the upper model, and the change propagation probability was adjusted. This causes further changes in the process of change propagation. Finally, cases of sanitation vehicles and motorbike engines were taken to verify the effectiveness of the proposed model.