Modeling and Determining Product Variety for Mass-customized Manufacturing

A great challenge facing final manufacturers of final products and OEMs today is product variety management which is crucial for mass-customized manufacturing. Product variations in most industries tend to be very numerous and firms often find themselves under pressure to solve problems with over-inventories, planning and product assembly complexity. In this paper, we investigate and present an approach to creating all possible product configurations and variations based on a given number of base components and optional number of complementary components. The idea of determining all possible product architectures is to investigate the influence of product variety on complexity of assembly processes.