Reuse of Manufacturing Knowledge to Facilitate Platform-Based Product Realization

Product platforming is a technique for exploiting commonality across a family of prod-ucts. While utilizing a common platform can have many advantages when developing andmanufacturing products, the approach places greater demands on collaboration, in par-ticular, the sharing and reuse of knowledge and information. Repositories are intended tofacilitate information sharing across organizational groups and geographically distrib-uted collaborators. A particular challenge in utilizing repositories is culling a search forthe most appropriate information for the problem at hand. The Reuse Existing Unit forShape and Efficiency (R.E.U.S.E.) method facilitates the search of information in a re-pository through three stages that consider similarity, efficiency, and configuration. Au-tomated search and filter techniques are implemented with interaction with the user toeffectively obtain the desired results. The similarity study uses thresholds to clarify dif-ferent opportunities for reuse. The user can then select alternatives for further examina-tion based on efficiency of satisfaction of desired characteristics. The degree of modifi-cation of the similar alternatives is reported to assist in the configuration of the newdesign. This method contributes to the field by (a) accounting for the variety of theproduct family during the reuse of existing process design information; (b) integrating anefficiency assessment for retrieval by considering characteristics beyond cost; and (c)addressing the search with a multicriteria method. The implementation of the R.E.U.S.Emethod is supported with an example of assembly line design for an air conditionermodule in automobile production.