Assembly Process Selection to Minimize Existing Assembly System Modification Cost During New Product Family Member Design Available to Purchase

Proper utilization of available assembly resources can reduce the development time and cost for platforms and new product family members. This paper presents a method to explicitly consider existing assembly plant configuration and resources during selection of assembly process for new product family members. In order to perform the trade-off studies, first constraints on the assembly sequence are identified and used to generate the feasible assembly sequence space, which is combinatorial in nature and is enumerated using recursive functions. The assembly sequence design spaces and representation of effects of constraints on these spaces to explicitly represent feasible regions, and efficiently enumerate designs within this space are investigated. A method that stops recursive growth based on constraints and minimization of assembly plant modification cost is used for efficient search of the feasible assembly sequence space. The assembly sequence modification cost is estimated by dividing assembly plant modification tasks into smaller activities and determining cost associated with each activity. Application of the Assembly Resource Utilization Design Module (ARUDM) to determine assembly sequence while increasing utilization of existing assembly plants is demonstrated using a coffeemaker family.