Abstract:
The objective of this thesis is to develop generic assembly relations to support variant
management to aid the product development for products as families.
The advent of the buyers' market has encouraged manufacturers to offer products as
families to meet customers needs for differentiation. This creates the corresponding
need for representing the product and process variants in a way to support the
assessment of impact of product variants.
Through the study of literature and standards, the current status of product modelling
and product family was captured. Existing models of product model have considered
representation of products as one of a kind and do not have the necessary capability to
incorporate the variation in production variants that is commonly seen in the assembly
of families of product. A Generic Assembly Relations Model (GARM) has been
developed to meet the requirements.
The generic Bill-of-Material (GBQM) and generic Bill-of-Process (GBQP) have been
introduced as a single formalism to represent the product and process variants. The
proposed model supports the reuse of product/process variants through the Generic
Assembly Relations and GBQM and GBQP. The integration is achieved by the generic
relations which act as the bridge between product and process models. This research
increases the understanding of how to model product and process in the product family
environment.
The GARM model works as a production support tool for the product family in the
Concurrent Engineering environment. With the GARM model, different views of the
requirements can be developed at an early stage; the designer can be supported with
feedback information such as the change of product component and assembly process.
The GARM model supports variant management to aid the product development for
products as families. The impact of the product variant on assembly process can be
evaluated through the model. It has been validated by illustrating how the data structure
definition supports the evaluation of changes in product family assembly process
definition when additional variants are added through an example from the Personal
Computer industry.