Mass Customization Manufacturing Research Articles

Integrating Fabric Formation and Textile Coloration Processes via Digital Inkjet Printing

With rapid progressions in the textile industry, it has become increasingly evident that there is a need for development of a textile printing system which will have the capacity to keep pace with current and future mass customization manufacturing requirements in the printing segment of the textile industry. Digital inkjet printing has the potential to provide such characteristics, in a continuous system combining digital inkjet printing with the fabric formation process. Analyzing various fiber types requires that a specific correlating link be developed to correspond with a given substrate and its respective dye class. Research conducted at Philadelphia University has focused intently on discovering a link for cotton substrates and reactive dye coloration. For future exploration of polyester, research into the design, synthesis and use of special cyclodextrins, (which have the dual capacity to function as suitable hosts for certain colorants, and act as sizing agents), will be the key component for successful integration for the given substrate.

An Information Modeling Framework for Product Families to Support Mass Customization Manufacturing

Developing product families has been recognized as an effective means to support Mass Customization Manufacturing (MCM). A Product Family Architecture (PFA) resembles the underpinning logic of assisting customers to converge to what a firm can deliver in terms of its capabilities and capacities. The representation of a PFA is essential for managing variety effectively across the entire product realization process encompassing sales, marketing, design, and manufacturing. This paper proposes a generic PFA representation in terms of representing multiple views of product families in a single context, using one generic variety representation structure for different views to minimize data redundancy, and generating specifications of individual product variants for different business functions coherently. Accordingly, an information modeling framework for product families is developed based on a combination of elements of semantic relationships with the object-oriented data model. An application of the proposed framework is demonstrated for power supply products. Also reported is a prototypical implementation using KAPPA-PC®.

Minimizing tardiness on a single processor with sequence-dependent setup times: a simulated annealing approach

In today's fast-paced Just-In-Time and mass customization manufacturing in a sequence-dependent setup environment, the challenge of making production schedules to meet due-date requirements is becoming a more complex problem. Unfortunately, much of the research on operations scheduling problems has either ignored setup times or assumed that setup times on each machine are independent of the job sequence. This paper considers the problem of minimizing tardiness, a common measure of due-date performance, in a sequence-dependent setup environment. Simulated annealing was used to solve the sequencing problem, and its performance was compared with random search. Our experimental results show that the algorithm can find a good solution fairly quickly, and thus can rework schedules frequently to react to variations in the schedule. The algorithm is invaluable for ‘on-line’ production scheduling and ‘last-minute’ changes to production schedule. The results of this research also suggest ways in which more complex and realistic job shop environments, such as multiple machines with a higher number of jobs in the sequence, and other scheduling objectives can be modeled. This research also investigates computational aspects of simulated annealing in solving complex scheduling problems.

A Collaborative Control System for Mass Customization Manufacturing

Mass Customization aims at producing customized products to meet individual customer's needs with mass production efficiency. The advent of this new mode of manufacturing introduces a different set of requirements on system control for manufacturing operations. The implications include the drastic increase of varieties, very small batch size, random arrival of orders, and wide spread of due dates. In addition, there are also factors such as similarity among tools, production plans and product designs. If properly utilized, that can help to reduce the complexities of the control systems. In order to develop a new type of control and coordination system to support mass customization, a heterogeneous coordination mechanism is developed. A price mechanism with the construct of intelligent agents in a market-like environment is investigated to fulfill the requirements.