Abstract
To meet a wide range of customer needs, a variety of product concepts can be modeled employing a platform approach. Whereas frequent market changes can be accommodated by dynamically modifying product concepts in iterations, capabilities in production are seldom well incorporated as part of design iterations. In this paper, a dynamic platform modeling approach that supports concurrent product-production reconfiguration is presented. The approach builds on Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE) processes and a function modeling technique is used to represent product-production variety streams inherent in a production operation model. To demonstrate the approach, a comprehensive case from the aerospace industry is presented. Conceptual representations of a set of aero engine sub-systems and a variety of welding configurations, including their inherent constraints, are mutually modeled and assessed. The results show that a set of product-production alternatives can be dynamically controlled by integrating product-production constraints using a production operation model. Following SBCE processes, inferior alternatives can be put aside until new information becomes available and a new set of alternatives can be reconfigured. The dynamics and concurrency of the approach can potentially reduce the risk of late and costly modifications that propagate from design to production.
Highlights
In today’s intensified global competition among manufacturers, meeting a wide range of customer needs with increased product customization and variety can be profitable
Manufacturers that strive to meet a wide range of customer needs and face problems of being responsive across design and production may try to avoid such problems by either (a) committing to production technologies early in design at the risk of constraining the product design space, or (b) waiting for the designs to become finalized before assessing their producibility at the risk of over-designing and ending up with product variants that prove to be inferior in production
Because production reconfiguration in this study aims to support the early design stages, models with a high degree of geometry detail, such as the ones created in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software, are only presented in the case study for pedagogical reasons
Summary
In today’s intensified global competition among manufacturers, meeting a wide range of customer needs with increased product customization and variety can be profitable. Manufacturers that strive to meet a wide range of customer needs and face problems of being responsive across design and production may try to avoid such problems by either (a) committing to production technologies early in design (when the product information is uncertain) at the risk of constraining the product design space, or (b) waiting for the designs to become finalized before assessing their producibility at the risk of over-designing and ending up with product variants that prove to be inferior in production. Product designs are commonly specified at a high level of detail before production engineers have a say about their producibility.
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