Concurrent development of product families and assembly systems

Multi-product assembly has become an important issue in industry because of market pressures for diversity, shorter product life and competition. However, diversity is in contradiction with other current goals as low costs, high productivity and standardisation. In this context, a concurrent strategy can contribute to find compromise solutions with product diversity and production effectiveness. In this paper, the authors discuss the concurrent design problem for product families and assembly systems. Models for product and process representation are presented. The principle of required flexibility minimization is introduced as one of the design criteria. Web grammars are applied to dynamically capture the progression on the design