Product Family Design for Changeable Learning Factories

Educational and research manufacturing systems, such as learning factories, provide an environment to learn, test and implement new product solutions and system paradigms. When learning factories are equipped with the capabilities of Changeable Manufacturing Systems (CMS), they can be used for investigating and teaching the changing effects on product design by manufacturing system reconfiguration, planning and control. Existing design approaches of new products respond to the change in customer, functional or market requirements. This paper presents a new approach to develop products for Changeable Learning Factories by identifying a suitable product family and designating corresponding product variants that show the limits of the existing system capabilities and demonstrating different system configurations based on its features for changeability.