Research On Techniques And System For Mass Customization Oriented Product Configuration

With the development of science and technology, the competition between products has become more and more fierce, and customers' personality requirement has become more and more critical. Traditional mass production (MP) mode is out of time. Mass customization (MC) is taking the place of MP to become the popular manufacturing mode for the modern enterprises. As an important part of MC, product configuration is the key technology and enabling means to realize fast product customization. This paper aims to the technologies, system and main processes of product configuration, and deeply studies the construction technology of web parts library, configuration solving method, configuration optimization and configuration evaluation. The main work is described as follows:The paper's research background and theoretic basis are firstly described, and a review of the development and status of mass customization and product configuration are analyzed in detail. The relevant methods and techniques are summarized. And existing deficient problems are pointed out, which bring forth the new tasks and directions of product configuration for MC. Finally, the project's meaning and main contents are presented.The contents and structure of product configuration system are introduced. Some relevant techniques, such as configuration knowledge presenting, problem solving, explanation, optimization and evaluation are analyzed. After analyzing the existing contents and techniques, an MC oriented web-based product configuration system framework is proposed.The web parts library is the fundamental of product configuration system, and it is also the resource library. An ontology based data description norm is used to build the web parts library, with the help of product family and the article characteristic table. The ontology based data description norm is convenient for the dynamic expansion and accurate query of web parts library. The STEP standard and XML language are used to solve the problem of neutual expression of different CAD file format. Static and dynamic workgroup permissions are combined to deal with the security problem. The application of web parts library in the configuration process is described in the end.The mapping from product configuration problem to constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is built so that we can use CSP to present the knowledge of product configuration problem. The common solving methods for CSP are given and their weakness is pointed out. Binary decision diagram (BDD) is combined with arc consistency to form a new method, which can solve the product configuration without backtracking. The basic function and usage of explanation is analyzed in detail and the truth maintenance system (TMS) is used for explanation in product configuration.The mathematical model of modular product configuration optimization is built, which is based on customer needs. Dynamic punishment function is adopted to transfer problem with constraints into the one without constraints. Hybrid particle swarm optimization (HPSO) is employed as the algorithm. Comparing with other intelligent optimization algorithm, HPSO is more efficient according to the simulation results. HPSO is proved to be fit for product configuration optimization because of its simpleness and high performance. According to the characteristic of product configuration under MC, the synthetic evaluation architecture of configuration cases is built to help customer find more appropriate configuration result. By introducing triangle fuzzy numbers, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is used to model and calculate the evaluation problem. Through the analysis of the bike evaluation system, the feasibility of FAHP method and the reasonableness of evaluation model are proved.Based on the above studies, a web-based configuration system prototype is developed and its running results prove the feasibility and the effectivity of the proposed methods in this paper.