Product family-based assembly sequence design methodology

Efforts taken by manufacturing companies to meet the increasing demand for product variety often lead to a proliferation of subassemblies. In this paper, we show that careful design of the product assembly sequence helps to create generic sub-assemblies that reduce subassembly proliferation and the cost of offering product variety. This approach of designing the assembly sequence to maximize the benefit from commonality of components and assembly operations, referred to as product family-based assembly sequence design, is the focus of this paper. After introducing the approach with a simple example, we formalize the notion of generic subassemblies, and present an algorithmic approach to identify generic subassemblies. We illustrate the algorithm with an example from the literature of an assembly from industry, and provide computational test results of the complexity and benefits of product family-based assembly sequence design.