Research And Design Of Product Configuration Management In Mass Customization

Product Structure and Configuration Management is a form of product data organization and management. Product Structure represent the hierarchy structure of the accessories and parts which are made up of the product, and Product Configuration is a process which make the product reality according to restriction relationship among the accessory, accessory set and part, part set defined in advance. This process can be done automatically or semi-automatically or interactively.With the technique of artificial intelligence such as special program, configurator, expert system, are used to assist product structure and configuration, it developed rapidly. At the same time, the research range of configuration is not limited in product configuration, it opens up widely, such as the research in field of medical treatment, commerce, news publishment are also developing step by step.With the development of the product configuration, commercial configurators appear, such as SAP PLM, MatrixOne. Many manufacture industry and product dealer use the product configuration technique to provide customization service and product, and some enterprise commercial application system provide the product configurator in web with the B2B,B2C commercial mode and to provide the product and service easily, conveniently and quickly, especially in this serveral years with the internet development, it becomes more and more widely.With the development of other enterprise information system such as ERP(Enterprise Resource Plan),PDM(Product Data Management), Product Configuration Management becomes more and more integrative with those system. The integrative Configurator has more comprehensive functions. It will optimize configuration result, strengthen ability to trace the result, lessen the data excess, lessen the noise of the communication and improve the quality and efficiency of design.Furthermore, manufacturing were greatly attending to a new produce mode: Mass Customization in recent year. Mass Customiztion mode intends to combine the Mass Production mode and Customization mode in order to make massly producing the customization product come true. This mode needs the support of Product Conguration technique which could assure the rapid production of the required product according to cusomization, so some even call it mass customization enabler.