Abstract
The distributed and horizontally integrated manufacturing environment in Agile Manufacturing (AM) paradigm demands for new product development methods that posses favorable advantages over conventional manufacturing approaches developed for vertically integrated environments. This paper proposes an integrated framework for the variant design of complex assemblies. First, the complementary assembly modelling concept is introduced. To cater for the needs for assembly variant design, the concept is materialized as two kinds of assembly models: assembly variants model (AVM) and assembly mating graphs (AMG). The former explicitly captures the hierarchical and functional relationships between constituent components while the latter explicitly captures the mating relationships at the manufacturing feature level. Then the assembly variant design methodology, which is based on these assembly models, is developed based on the concept of Constraint Group (CG). The matching components are searched and retrieved from the AVM and then the CGs are identified by manipulating the AMGs. Finally, the assembly variant design process is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem which is solved using a standard solver. This framework provides a systematic approach to facilitate the variant design of complex assembly products in the agile manufacturing environment.