Mass Customization Oriented Modular Design of Office-chair Considering Human Body Size

Modular design is a very important design methodology that allows designers to develop a product family at low product development and production cost. This design methodology is also very powerful for products that require frequent design changes due to customer requirements. Most research on modular design is focused on the modularization based on functional decomposition, physical interface and manufacturing process of parts. In this paper, we propose a modularization method that takes size of human body parts into consideration for products which have physical interactions with the products such as office chairs and sport machines. Evaluation of modular design is based on dependence measurement between every pair of components in the design. In addition we proposed a module sizing method for the maximization of customer satisfaction in MC(Mass Customization) environment.