Knowledge-Based Configuration of Integrated Product and Process Platforms

The definition of the content of a product platform highly affects the possibility to engineer and produce unique and optimized products to suit customer needs. In this paper, generic configurable autonomous subsystems, Configurable Components (CCs), are used to define platforms that can be used to configure and instantiate product as well as process structures and to optimize instantiated part solutions. To simulate a realistic industrial environment, a configuration demonstrator has been developed and used to perform case studies in order to test the CC concept. The test cases are focused on geometrical interfaces between components. Communication functionality between the demonstrator and a CAT (Computer Aided Tolerancing) tool has been developed to enable automatic optimization of interface concepts during configuration. In summary, the paper shows that, given variant-specific input data, a knowledge-based platform definition with high design bandwidth can be used to configure, engineer and manufacture an instanced product variant.