A mass customization information framework for integration of customer in the configuration/design of a customized product

One of the aspects of mass customization is to provide customers with products that are manufactured to their needs and requirements. To provide such support requires better integration of the customer into different stages of design and manufacturing. Expansion of the Internet provides an opportunity for such an integration, which will need to link design and manufacturing of the company with the customer. In current approaches, customers usually specify the options and get the price or simple pictures of the object. In this paper we present a framework in which customer options and size parameters are gathered using the Internet. It is used to automatically generate a 3-dimensional computer-aided design model of the product, estimate the price of the product, and generate assembly sequence information. The framework for mass customization of products necessitates information management among different segments of the company and the customer. The Internet-based system presented in this paper uses a graph grammar and templates to explicitly maintain correspondence among various types of product information from a module perspective. The system is demonstrated using a customizable coffeemaker product family.