Reuse of manufacturing knowledge to facilitate platform-based product realization

Product platforming is a technique for exploiting commonality across a family of products. While utilizing a common platform can have many advantages when developing and manufacturing products, the approach places greater demands on collaboration, in particular, the sharing and reuse of knowledge and information. Repositories are intended to facilitate information sharing across organizational groups and geographically distributed collaborators. A particular challenge in utilizing repositories is culling a search for the most appropriate information for the problem at hand. The Reuse Existing Unit for Shape and Efficiency (R.E.U.S.E.) method facilitates the search of information in a repository through three stages that consider similarity, efficiency, and configuration. Automated search and filter techniques are implemented with interaction with the user to effectively obtain the desired results. The similarity study uses thresholds to clarify different opportunities for reuse. The user can then select alternatives for further examination based on efficiency of satisfaction of desired characteristics. The degree of modification of the similar alternatives is reported to assist in the configuration of the new design. This method contributes to the field by (a) accounting for the variety of the product family during the reuse of existing process design information; (b) integrating an efficiency 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.E method is supported with an example of assembly line design for an air conditioner module in automobile production.