The rising demand for individualized products in the price segment of mass products is increasingly challenging the industry. As a result of the growing product differentiation, the number of product variants is rising while the batch sizes are decreasing. The variant-specific investments and batch-specific set-up costs rise, which can cause classical production processes (e.g., injection molding) to reach their economic limits. Consequently, there is a need for manufacturing concepts that enable the economical production of variants while ensuring sufficient production volumes. A novel manufacturing concept that faces these requirements is Incremental Manufacturing (IM).

The IM approach is based on a production concept, where products are assembled from pre-produced parts and finalized by additive and subtractive manufacturing steps. This strategy increases the degree of freedom in the product design and production planning phase, as well as the interaction of different production steps. To handle this design complexity and to exploit the full potential of the manufacturing concept, new methods and tools are required to support the designer in an early phase of the product development.

This paper presents an algorithm-based method to support the redesign of a reference product for IM. An essential key to ensure production capacity and economic efficiency is the differentiation of the product into standard and variant-specific components. This implies a systematic definition of pre-produced parts in order to keep the number of features added by additive or subtractive manufacturing as low as possible. Therefore, the focus of the method is on an automated derivation of conceptual part designs with consideration of aspects of design for variety (DfV) and part consolidation (PC).

The paper reviews graph-based methods and guidelines for the development of variant products. Besides, methodical approaches and guidelines of PC, especially in the area of additive manufacturing, are studied. On this basis, rules are identified that should be taken into consideration by redesigning a product for the IM approach. A graph containing physical and functional information of the disassembled product is weighted based on the derived rules. By the application of a multistage cluster process, it is possible to determine groups of components that should be considered for a module or part consolidation. In a subsequent step, the resulting product structures and component shapes are examined to other abstracted product variants concerning structural and geometric similarities. Thereby, methods of graph matching and 3D shape matching are applied. This provides the ability to identify components or groups of components that appear suitable for the realization of a pre-produced part across variants. Furthermore, shape matching provides the possibility of assigning existing standard parts to the identified clusters.

In summary, the paper provides an algorithm-based method, which allows the automated definition and allocation of pre-produced parts as well as components to be added by additive or subtractive manufacturing, according to the principles of DfV. A case study is provided to illustrate the algorithm. Furthermore, the general applicability of the method for the conceptual design of product variants beyond IM is demonstrated.


Algorithm-Based Support for the Redesign of Product Variants

Division / Sponsors: 
Aerospace, Bioengineering, Applied Mechanics, Design Engineering Division, Advanced Energy Systems, Manufacturing Engineering Division, Noise Control and Acoustics, Nondestructive Evaluation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis (NDPD), Nuclear Engineering Division, Process Industries Division, Fluids Engineering, Heat Transfer, Materials, Microelectromechanical Systems, Safety Engineering and Risk Analysis, Computers & Information in Engineering


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2020/volume/84478

IMECE2020 - Virtual Conference

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.