Multi-period additive/subtractive product platform design and inventory management

Abstract

Forming product platforms is an effective strategy to offer products variety economically. The short products life span and new variants pose a challenge to designing platforms, which satisfy the changing customer demands. There is a need to design platforms that can adapt to changes. In addition, it is important to account for the partially completed platforms inventory held in each production period which could be utilised in subsequent production periods. An important contribution of this work is the use of combined additive and subtractive manufacturing in customising the product platform by adding and/or removing features to suit the changing product features and demands for different product variants. In this paper, a holistic non-linear model is presented for designing optimal multi-period additive/subtractive product platforms and managing their inventory. The model provides the optimal product platform design for each production period, macro process plans for customisation, the number of each platform stored as inventory, and the product variant platform assignment. The initial model is subsequently linearised to reduce computation time. A gear shaft family of products is used as a demonstration example. The model redesigns the product platform as needed to meet the changing demand of each product variant while minimising the costs.