CONCURRENT ENGINEERING : Research and Applications Decision Support System for Product Configuration in Mass Customization Environments

Mass customization (MC) is an emergent concept in industry intended to provide customized products or services through flexible process in high volumes and at reasonably low costs. Product customization is an important strategy for accomplishing customer satisfaction with exclusive products at reasonable prices. This paper proposes a decision support system for facilitating design and customer collaboration in the process of selecting product configuration in MC environments. The system integrates object-oriented programming, multiattribute decision analysis, and integer linear programming to support product/service customization where customer choice is managed by the relative relevance of a set of attributes as well as a set of component combinations offered by the company, and restrained by a set of technical, aesthetical, and financial constraints defined interactively by designers and customers. The integration of these models results in the representation of the MC business process taking into account simultaneously the technical, explicit, and objective view taken by designers and the customer’s view based on intentions and perceptions. Using the system, the customer can define rules and provide information that can be used to represent tacit knowledge which is incorporated in an integer linear programming (ILP) model that optimizes the utility of a specific customer. As a result, the computer system is capable of implementing in an explicit, dynamic, and flexible way the cognitive process that characterizes the product configuration in MC strategy. The DSS can be considered as a concurrent engineering environment for MC production systems. A simple case study is presented that demonstrate how the program is utilized and the type of output it provides.

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