Process Planning for Mass Customization

Process planning connects product designs and the production of the designed products. It determines the production cost, quality and production cycle time. Usually one process plan is built and fixed for a unique product design before the production. However in mass customization, the possible number of unique products can be astronomical in order to satisfy diversified individual customer needs. The complexity of the product variety will be transferred to the process planning. In addition, in response to the diversified customer needs, modern manufacturing systems introduce more flexible resources for producing the diverse products within short times while maintaining good quality. One of the consequences of increasing use of flexible resources is the explosive number of potential process plan alternatives for each unique product. The compounding effects of product variety and process variety can result in a chaotic manufacturing and negative economical consequences. It is imperative to develop a new approach of process planning that not only can handle the great complexity derived from the product variety and the flexible resources, but also can capture the process plan alternatives for each unique product in order to fully subjugate the flexibility of the manufacturing systems for achieving mass customization. This paper develops such an approach that dynamically generates the process plan with alternatives for each unique product on demand. It is built based on the rationalization of product variety and process variety as well as their relationships. A case study is presented to illustrate the approach.