Designing modular manufacturing systems using mass customisation theories and methods

Today, manufacturing systems are developed as engineered to order
(ETO) solutions tailored to produce a specific product or a limited product mix.
However, such dedicated systems are not consistent with the current market
demands for rapid product changes, high product variety, and customisation. In
response, modular manufacturing systems (MMS) are evolving, which are
aimed to possess the required responsiveness and to be the manufacturing
paradigm of mass customisation (MC). Hereby, MMS brings the development
process of manufacturing systems against configured to order (CTO). Up to
now, research in MMS has primarily focused on potential benefits, basic
principles, and enabling technologies, while the approaches of actually
designing and creating modular architectures have received less attention. A
potential to fill these gaps by applying MC theories and methods is identified
based on the commonalities in the basic modular approaches of MC and MMS.
This paper analyses this potential and evaluates it through three conducted
cases within the domain of industrial automation and robotics. Based on the
results, the paper discusses the prospective to form an MMS design framework
by utilising selected MC theories and methods.