Mapping product design specification for mass customization

Mass customization is an emerging field in manufacturing research community where customer satisfaction is achieved by complying with exact customer requirements at mass production efficiencies. Product varieties have mostly failed in the aspect of satisfying customer requirements, since knowing beforehand exactly what customer needs is beyond the scope of any manufacturing or marketing paradigm. So design to order and build to order is widely talked in the industry to capture heterogeneous market segments. In order to achieve the challenging task of customization at mass production efficiencies, a tight integration of the various entities involved is necessary. Gathering customer requirements, finalizing product design and eventual manufacturing need to be seamlessly integrated to achieve mass production efficiencies. Product designs are classified into customizable product platform families, and then searched based on customer requirements to identify the most conformal design family. Finally the design parameter transport is carried out from customer domain to product domain. Eventually a valid and realizable product specification is generated. The paper will address these issues of classification, selection and ultimately the mapping of parameters. A methodology to classify the product design information, which can easily accommodate design variations based on product platform architecture is proposed. Further, adaptive design customization, which relates most design parameters with the scalable platform design parameters using matrix formulation, is discussed. The proposed design parameter classification and adaptive synthesis of design parameters is applied to a spring design example.