Research On Identification And Description Approaches To The Information About Customer Needs For Mass Customization

Mass customization, aiming at delivering an increasing product variety that best serves customer needs while keeping mass production efficiency, becomes a necessary paradigm for manufacturing industries. Mass customization is oriented by customer needs (CN), which needs the enterprises to response to different requirements as quickly as possible. The product customization is implemented with several steps, such as capturing and identifying initial requirements, understanding the requirement exactly, mapping the requirement by QFD. During these steps, the identifying and disposal of CN is the premise and basis. And the process of identifying and disposal of the CN include: description of CN, building of requirement model, identifying way of different kinds of CN. So, it is important to classify and express different customer needs correctly and erect customer need knowledge model, in order to identify individual customer requirements.Firstly, the elementary theories of Mass customization, customer requirement description and customer need mapping are presented. The implement approaches of mass customization are introduced briefly, and the product family model, i.e. function model, solution model and structure model with the mapping relationships among them is emphasized. After that, different information description ways are introduced and the advantages and disadvantages of these ways are analyzed. At the same time, the concepts of Quality Function Deployment and product family are illustrated.Secondly, the taxonomy model of the information about customer needs for mass customization is established. Based on this model, the corresponding formal semantic description approaches to these five types of CN information are discussed. And then, the structured information is represented by framework method. And the semi-structured and unstructured information are represented with the fuzzy frameworks. Finally, the practicability of the model is illustrated with two application cases.Thirdly, the disposal steps of customer requirements are analyzed. By doing this, the knowledge of customer requirement during mass customization can be captured. And then, the ontology of customer need is built. Finally, the detailed structure of the customer need knowledge model and customer need repository are researched.Lastly, the structured approaches of customer needs is illustrated based on the requirement structure model, and the concept of general customer need (GCN) is introduced. And then the merit of GCN and the mapping relationship between GCN and requirement structure model are researched. According to the principle of similarity calculation,the identifying ways of different kinds of CN are implemented. With that, the fuzzy clustering of CN is studied. During this process, different distance calculation methods corresponding to five kinds of customer need are given. Finally, the customer classification is implemented by fuzzy clustering.