Thesis title: "Developing Manufacturing System Platforms"
For manufacturers, manufacturing system platforms are a way to achieve manufacturing systems capable of changing according to their needs, accelerating new product introduction and development of new manufacturing systems. They represent a consolidation of existing production facilities and the definitive place to start when a new production development task is undertaken. Developing and implementing these manufacturing system platforms remains a challenging task. To address issues within manufacturing system platform development, a design science framework is employed to develop and apply new and existing vocabulary, classifications, models, methods and instantiations. Inspiration is taken from product development, software architecture, and system engineering, using concepts from all three to grow the knowledge base on manufacturing system platforms, applying existing and new concepts in an industrial context through a series of case studies.