Flexibility - Grand Challenge for Product Design and Production: Review and Status

Abstract

As seen in recent years, the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment has made flexibility in product design and production planning more important than ever. Therefore, companies must be able to quickly respond to the dynamically changing environment. However, research on the flexibility of product design and manufacturing systems has been underway for a long time, only a few studies address their relationship.In this paper, we give an overview of literature related to flexibility and add transparency to the relationship between engineering changes, product development, and production. Based on that, we propose a conceptual framework for co-development to improve the flexibility of product development and production. As part of the framework, we introduce a visualization that reveals the propagation of changes in the product and into the production to create deeper insights for conjoint redesign. To exploit further synergies of product and production, we suggest modularization with focus on strategic module drivers enhancing flexibility. Further support for the comparison of alternative concepts can be provided through digital twin-based simulations of the production system.