Shape Commonalization to Develop Common Platforms for Mass Customization

Abstract

To be a global leader in the current market, a company needs to keep on adapting to the changing requirements of its customers and also provide customization of its products to suit the customers’ needs. A robust product platform can support a variety of products to satisfy different segments of the market with reduced manufacturing and product development cost. The common components for a set of similar products belonging to a family can be grouped into a common platform. However, development of product platform requires measuring similarity among a set of products. This chapter presents an approach to measure the degree of similarity among a set of products by extracting the information from their existing CAD models. The extraction process leads to a suitable development of shape commonality indices to identify the components and products that can be potentially arranged under a common platform. Two case studies are presented to demonstrate the steps of the approach.