Product Family Modelling for Manufacturing Planning

To enable product configuration of a product family, it is important to develop a model of the selected product family. From such a model, an often performed practice is to make a product configurator from which customers can specify individual products from the family.
To get further utilisation of the product family model, however, the model should be enriched with data for planning and execution of the manufacturing processes. The idea is that, when any individual product is specified using the product configurator, a product model can be extracted with all data necessary for planning of the manufacturing processes. Obviously, data for identification of all used modules and components are included in the product model but also for instance data for processing and assembly operations must be available. These data are not always related entirely to the modules and components but are sometimes also dependent on the specific assembly structure of the configured product, i.e. the combination of modules.
In this paper, issues of how to create manufacturing structures and related planning data in product family models are presented. Primarily, the more complicated multi-level manufacturing structures are regarded and it is argued that the models need to specify other structures for manufacturing compared with the product structure for configuration. Further, the problem of including attributes for of planning data is addressed and it is shown this may be complicated because such specifications may be dependent of the structure and need to be represented in a general for valid for all possible configurations.