Research On Key Technologies And Integrated Application Of Product Configuration Oriented To Mass Customization

With the development of the market economy and the progress of science and technology, marketing environment is changing accordingly. At present, the globalization of manufacturing industry competition and the diversification of customer needs put forward new demands to modern enterprises. The enterprises must pay attention to the personalized and diversified needs of customers, to be able to make quick response to customers’ needs and provide satisfactory products of high quality at lower price, which is the fundamental guideline of realizing own survival and development. Mass Customization (MC) is an effective way to achieve these goals. And product configuration design is the most important part of overall technical solution in the MC system. Under the background, research on the effective method and technology of product configuration has drawn widely and constant attention from enterprises and scholars. So this dissertation systematically studies the key technologies and methods in different stages of the product configuration design cycle in MC mode and will bring important theoretical significance and practical significance.At first, the related technical architecture in mass customization was summarized, followed by discussion of the important role that product configuration design played in MC system, domestic and foreign researches that related to field of product configuration were concluded as well. At last, to solve the existing problems and shortcomings in this research area, main contents and ideas of this dissertation were proposed.Customer demand is the source data of product configuration design, so obtaining and translating specific customer requirement information quickly and accurately is prerequisite to achieve effective product configuration result. Based on in-depth analysis of customer demand characteristics in MC environment, method of requirement elicitation, decomposition and conversion was proposed and a complete set of formal semantic model was built as well. Calculation method of concept similarity between customer requirement items and product feature items was adopted to determine the mapping way of both. Considering the relationship between product quality characteristics, an improved weight calculation method for product quality characteristic was established. Mapping steps of customer requirements were designed and effectiveness of this method was verified by an example.In order to configure products quickly and effectively, it’s necessary to build a product configuration model with clear hierarchy and complete knowledge representation. At first, object oriented technology was adopted to build reusable Product Family Configuration Unit (PFCU) model in this dissertation, and then knowledge representation of PFCU was expressed by frame structure, configuration characteristics and association relationship of PFCU were studied deeply. Finally, product family configuration model was built based on PFCU and whole modeling procedures were put forward by an example.Product configuration solving is a typical knowledge reasoning process. An integrated solving framework that combines Case-Based Reasoning and Model-Based Reasoning was proposed to achieve product configuration result driven by customer requirements. The matching problem of case similarity in CBR was taken as the research object. Concept of customer demand overflowing was proposed and subsection exponential functions were used to calculate comprehensive customer satisfaction. To determine target object in multi-product families, concept of Product Family Decision Feature (PFDF) was proposed. According to calculation on information entropy of PFDF, objective priority ranking of features was established. Instances of PFCU were expressed by configuration feature table. Finally, the reasoning solution and the algorithm were put forward based on PFCM reasoning.In order to solve the customer scheme selection problem of products with insufficient constraints, concept of under-constrained configuration was proposed, a configuration optimization mathematical model was built to optimize the performance, cost and term. An improved non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm was employed to work out product configuration scheme, with a combination of non-dominated sorting and multi-dimension niche technology, and population selection and qualitatively evaluation were improved in this algorithm. Finally, a simulation example was given to show the validity of the method as well as performance comparison among different genetic algorithms to show the high efficiency of the proposed algorithm.To perform product configuration design activities with computer-aided support, a PDM system integrating product configuration function was put forward. The architecture of this software system was planned and main function modules were analyzed as well. Finally, the implementation process of the system was introduced with an application example.