Variability management

Abstract

The global market, different and changing environmental laws, the customer wish for individualization, time-to-market, product costs, and the pressure on manufacturers to discover new product niches, to name only a few variability drivers, result in an ever increasing number of product variants in nearly all engineering disciplines as, for example, in car manufacturing. Mastering the related increasing product complexity throughout the whole product lifecycle is and remains one of the key advantages in competition for the future. Currently for a manufacturer, as for any other discipline, it is no option not to invest in an efficient and effective variability handling machinery able to cope with the arising challenges. Not only the task to invent, develop, introduce and manage new variants is important but also to decide which variant to develop, which to remove and which to not develop at all. The consequences of such decisions with respect to productline variability have to be computed based on formalized bases such that an optimized product variability can assure on the one hand customer satisfaction and on the other hand cost reduction within the variability-related engineering processes. This chapter presents current research in the field of product variability configuration, analysis and visualisation. It presents solution sketches based on formal logic that were illustrated by some real world examples.