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(R).