Increased demand for a greater variety of consumer products has forced many companies to
rethink their strategies to offer more product variants. For manufacturers, producing a variety …

The nature of competitive markets continuously pushes manufacturers to develop new
products to meet the increasingly diversified customer demands. Manufacturers thus have to …

The German manufacturing industry has to withstand an increasing global competition on
product quality and production costs. As labor costs are high, several industries have …

ABSTRACT Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (RMS) emerged from companies' needs
to increase their responsiveness to an uncertain market, in which customers are increasingly …

Product family design by module configuration is conducive to accommodating product
variety while maintaining mass production efficiency. Effective fulfillment of product families …

To meet the diverse needs of customers with a competitive offering, many companies are
utilizing product families and platform-based product development to increase variety …

The optimal design of a supply chain network is a challenging problem, especially for large
networks where there are multiple objectives. Such problems are usually formulated as …

Product configuration involves selecting common components/modules of individualised
products. This is done according to customer requirements under mass customisation …

When the product family (PF) and the supply chain designs (SCD) are aligned and
integrated, original equipment manufacturers (OEM) are more likely to improve their …

Product family design utilizes platform-based modularity to enable product variety and
efficient mass-production. While product platform issues have attracted much attention from …