Research On Product Lifecycle Modeling And Configuration Optimization For Mass Customization

The development of information technology and manufacturing technology and the deepening of economic globalization have dramatically impacted the competition of enterprises. On the one hand, the efficiency of enterprise has been improved by the supports of the new technologies; on the other hand, the customers’ requirements become more and more personalized due to these new technologies and the global competition accelerates this trend. In this condition, the enterprise has to manage the customers’ individual requirements effectively and timely to win the competition against other competitors.Mass customization emerges under such situations. Its objective is to provide individual products for individual customers’ requirements by the cost, quality and efficiency of mass production. Considerable researches have been received from both academic and industrials in the past decades. A lot of methods and technologies have been proposed to achieve the objective of mass customization. Though these progresses, there are still a lot of problems need to be studied further in this field. In this work, based on the literatures review, a new kind method-product lifecycle configuration for mass customization is proposed to extend the traditional customized product design method-product configuration. By combining the theories of product lifecycle management, concurrent engineering and product configuration, the proposed product lifecycle configuration aims to achieve synchronous configuration and optimization of product lifecycle processes.Firstly, the framework of product lifecycle configuration is analyzed, and due to the distributed nature of product lifecycle configuration, a Multi-Agent based product lifecycle configuration framework is proposed in the work. All participants of product lifecycle configuration can work cooperatively to configure customized products for individual customers’ requirements under this framework.Because the participants of product lifecycle configuration come from different departments and they have different knowledge about the product and different educational backgrounds, they cannot cooperative to work effectively. In this work, a semantic web ontology based product lifecycle information model is introduced to help the participants for their communications, and also the software Agents can communicate by the ontology. And for problems solving in product lifecycle configuration, an AND-OR tree or AND-OR graph based model is also proposed for the product lifecycle information modeling.For the product lifecycle configuration, four kinds of configuration processes are considered in this work, and they are traditional product configuration, concurrent configuration of customized product design, manufacturing process planning and manufacturing resource allocation, concurrent configuration of customized product design, manufacturing process planning and maintenance process planning, and concurrent configuration of customized product design and supply chain design.To solve the four kinds of product lifecycle configurations effectively, four kinds of algorithms are proposed, and they are novel adaptive quantum genetic algorithm based product configuration, multi-population based cooperative genetic programming based concurrent configuration of customized product design, manufacturing process planning and manufacturing resource allocation, multi-population based cooperative genetic programming based concurrent configuration of customized product design, manufacturing process planning and maintenance process planning, and parallel cooperative quantum genetic algorithm based concurrent configuration of customized product design and supply chain design. Case studies are also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms. And to illustrate the advantages of the proposed algorithms, four groups of comparative experiments are created for each algorithm. The experimental results show that all the proposed algorithms have very good search abilities for optimality and high efficiency on computing.To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies for product lifecycle configuration, a Multi-Agent based prototype system for product lifecycle configuration is implemented by Java language in this work. And at last, an industrial case study about a customized window in a furniture company is used as an application of the prototype system and also is used to validate the effectiveness of proposed product configuration methods. The results of the application show that the proposed theories and methods can improve the efficiency of the configuration design, the customer satisfaction and the business process of the enterprises effectively, and further to promote the abilities of competitions.