Over the last few years Concurrent Engineering has been extensively used to increase competitiveness. It has proven to be a successful technique to improve quality and reduce cost. However, applying this technique to the arena of customized production has not been addressed. For customized products, where units are built to a unique set of customer specifications, product design is a problem that affects many businesses. For customized production, a system that is capable of high-throughput automatic design generation is needed, as designs are made for every unit manufactured, and often needed at time of quotation.;This dissertation presents a Concurrent Engineering design approach for highly customized products. A design system has been developed to create distribution transformers. The system consists of two components: an electrical design system and an Intelligent CAD system for mechanical design. The electrical design system uses a combination of knowledge-based and procedural programs, as well as relational databases to create a core and coil design. That design is then read by the Intelligent CAD system to attempt generating the mechanical design. For cases that the system does not possess enough knowledge, the user is given the choice of modifying the CAD model, while the system provides on-line checking of user induced changes. The electrical design system is evaluated in a set of test problems. A case study is presented to illustrate the application of both the electrical and mechanical design systems.
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