Minicells for Mass Customization Manufacturing

摘要

Mass customization (MC) involves the production of individually customized products at near mass productionrnefficiency. The high product variety renders manufacturing to stock uneconomical. Therefore an efficient productionrnsystem is needed to achieve short delivery times. In this paper, a multi-staged minicell configuration is proposed forrnMC manufacturing. Here the production operations are divided into multiple stages, with one or more minicells inrneach stage. Each product will visit one or more minicells, depending on the customization requirements. The multistagedrnstructure allows for flexible routing of option families necessary for MC manufacturing. The proposedrnapproach is illustrated using an example.