Automatic generation of variants depending on changes of product properties in a flexible manufacturing environment

• Automatic BOM formulation procedure is defined for variant generation.
• How CAD/CAM data can be used to construct dynamic BOMs is handled.
• Automatic variant generation steps and procedure are defined.
• Genetic algorithm is used for the system test.
• Data of 6228 BOMs is generated with definition of 665 BOMs, and 89% improvement is achieved by the number of BOM.

Competition forces manufacturing systems to be flexible and to increase product variety and process complexity. These tasks depend on the flexible design of a bill of materials (BOM), one of the most important inputs in manufacturing planning and control systems. Product variety forces systems to generate BOMs with regard to product properties through a BOM pattern. A variant bill of materials provides a structure to manage product variability. In this study, an algorithm is designed to build a BOM pattern using computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) data, and another algorithm is designed to generate variants with regard to product specifications. Genetic algorithm is used to generate new products to provide high product variability for testing algorithms. After the test, both algorithms are applied to a real industry problem. The BOM pattern is built automatically using CAD/CAM data, and variants are generated with regard to the pattern, and the results are discussed.