Today manufacturing companies are increasingly using digital tools to react to the increased product complexity. The process today, however, is still characterized by manual activities for changes or missing data continuity, which leads to errors in the digital models for the product and assembly system. Scope of this research is a complete digital representation of product development processes with the integrated planning process for the associated assembly system and its system configuration options. The processes are implemented by graph-based design languages based on diagrams of Unified-Modelling-Language. The unique approach enables the automatic generation and evaluation of several product variants as well as different assembly system configurations. This is illustrated by the example of the design of a self-balancing scooter and its assembly system configurations. A main research goal is to investigate the model-based integration of the different domains and to consider the product and assembly system variants in order to accelerate the planning process and achieve robust and congruent planning results. These can be evaluated based on different domain-specific key figures and thus the appropriate configuration of product and its assembly system can be selected. This paper concludes that product variant management remains challenging. Graph-based design languages improve the interface handling between different domains.
展开▼
