Abstract
Production companies are today faced with increasing product varieties, shortened development times and product life cycles, and decreasing lot sizes. Reconfigurable manufacturing and assembly have been developed as new manufacturing paradigm to face this challenging market environment. However, the aspects of enabling multi-product assembly and operational reconfiguration are rarely addressed. This article presents a new approach, aiming at this research potential: the use of component locating in the center of a new assembly system design method around component locating modules. It is detailed how the use of component locating allows the generation of a system architectures solution space. To support the application of locating strategies, a new model, the precedence-locating graph, is introduced. The approach is described with an illustrative example and the new concept has been tested on an industrial case study in the automotive industry which can only be mentioned partially due to confidentiality issues.
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