Approach for the rationalisation of product lines variety

Antonio Giovannini (1, 2) , Alexis Aubry (1) , Hervé Panetto (1) , Hind El Haouzi (1) , Ludovic Pierrel (2) , Michele Dassisti (3)

1 CRAN - Centre de Recherche en Automatique de Nancy
2 TRANE - TRANE SAS
3 Polytechnic University of Bari / Politecnico di Bari

The product variety management is a key process to deal with the flexibility requested by the mass customisation. In this paper we show that current variety-modelling methods miss a customer representation: without a proper assessment of the customers is not possible to define the product variety that has to be developed to meet the requirements of a customer segment. Here we present an innovative approach to rationalise the product variety, i.e. to link each product variant to the customer profile who needs it. The aim is to optimise the product variety avoiding excesses (variants not related to a customer), lacks (customers not related to a variant) or redundancies (two or more variants proposed to a customer). An overview of customer modelling approaches in the classic product design (non-customisable) is presented. The innovative approach is here developed using system-thinking concepts. A knowledge-based system that uses this approach is designed. Finally the approach is explained using a real industrial case of a quasi-real coil design process.

Mots clés: Mass customization; Product variety; Knowledge representation; Knowledge-based system

Domaines: Automatique / Robotique

Antonio Giovannini, Alexis Aubry, Hervé Panetto, Hind El Haouzi, Ludovic Pierrel, et al.. Approach for the rationalisation of product lines variety. 19th IFAC World Congress, Aug 2014, Cape Town, South Africa. pp.3280-3291, ⟨10.3182/20140824-6-ZA-1003.02226⟩. ⟨hal-01081763⟩