Abstract
Every successful company have a diversified product portfolio based on their customer demand. Though products are branded as different variants, versions etc. most of them are similar products with little variations in their features or functions they perform. With the traditional, product centric approach to handle variation, new techniques like Clone and own were implemented in which engineers pick the most similar one available, copy it, make changes to it and present it as a new variant. Even though this approach employs reuse, but the savings occur once and only once. This project discussed how companies can exploit the commonality between the products, manage variability and get benefitted using concepts like feature based modelling, materialization etc. Feature based modelling was extensively being used in software industry, this paper focuses on using the same methods in manufacturing industry and improve the product lines for better efficiency. This project specifically investigates the assembly lines and how they can be programmed and documented to handle the portfolio of products efficiently through the entire Product Life Cycle using pure::variants, a leading variant-management tool. The use feature based modelling and variability management techniques through the assembly lines greatly reduces the evolution and development time of variants, improves cycle time and with project management documents like instruction Manuals, Bill of materials etc. Keywords: Central Variability Model (CVM), Feature based modelling, Pure Variants, Assembly Lines, Product Life Cycle.
Advisor
Kuldeep Agarwal
Committee Member
Shaheen Ahmed
Committee Member
Winston Sealy
Date of Degree
2019
Language
english
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Automotive and Manufacturing Engineering Technology
College
Science, Engineering and Technology
Recommended Citation
Gokapai, S. (2019). Managing variability in assembly lines [Master’s thesis, Minnesota State University, Mankato]. Cornerstone: A Collection of Scholarly and Creative Works for Minnesota State University, Mankato. https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/etds/917/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Manufacturing Commons, Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons