Product Family-Based Assembly Sequence Design Methodology

Efforts taken by manufacturing companies to meet the increasing demand for product variety oilen lead to a proliferation of subassemblies. In this paper, we show that careii..d design of product assembly sequence helps create generic subassemblies that reduce subassembly proliferation and the cost of offering product variety. This approach of designing the assembly sequence to maximize the benefit from commonality of components and assembly operations, referred to as product family-based assembly sequence design, is the focus of this paper. Afler introducing the approach with a simple example, we formalize the notion of generic subassemblies, and present an algorithmic approach to identi~ generic subassemblies. We illustrate the algorithm with an example from the literature of an assembly from industry, and provide computational test results of the complexity and benefits of product family-based assembly sequence design. Acknowledgments: The authors gratefidly acknowledge the financial support fkom the University Research Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program to study design flexibility and reusability. The authors are also indebted to Dr. Patrick Jaillet for his valuable input, and to Harsha Vardhana for his help in computational analysis. 1.