A Product Configurator for Cloud Manufacturing

Product configurators have become an important enabler for enterprises to achieve product customization in order to address individual customers’ requirements. Despite adoption across a wide range of application domains from automotive to consumer goods, even state-of-the-art product configuration systems are limited in their ability to quickly respond to changes in the production systems that deliver the goods specified. Enabled by the emerging paradigm of cloud manufacturing, the authors propose a “configurable configurator” that is automatically updated to reflect changes in the supply chain. The paper reports the ongoing research and development towards a dynamically generated system that supports product configuration, visualization and assessment from the cloud manufacturing concept of Manufacturing-as-a-Service (MaaS). In addition to outlining the architecture of such a system, an overview of its modules and integration to the cloud manufacturing platform is described. Lastly, the case study of a customizable façade module is presented with two different scenarios to demonstrate the prototype implementation and validate the proposed approach.