| Summary: | Efforts taken by manufacturing companies to meet the increasing demand for product
variety often lead to a proliferation of subassemblies. In this paper, we show that careful
design of product assembly sequence helps create generic subassemblies that reduce
subassembly proliferation and the cost of offering product variety. This approach of
designing the assembly sequence to maximize the benefit from commonality of
components and assembly operations, referred to as product family-based assembly
sequence design, is the focus of this paper. After introducing the approach with a simple
example, we formalize the notion of generic subassemblies, and present an algorithmic
approach to identify generic subassemblies. We illustrate the algorithm with an example
from the literature of an assembly from industry, and provide computational test results of
the complexity and benefits of product family-based assembly sequence design.
|
|---|