Title: A modular minicell configuration for mass customisation manufacturing

Authors: Fazleena Badurdeen, Dale Masel

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506, USA. ' Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA

Abstract: Mass customisation aims at providing products and services to meet individual customer needs at near mass production efficiency. Successful mass customisation requires a manufacturing system that is highly flexible to adapt to customer needs, has low lead times, and enables customisation at a low cost. Developing a manufacturing system to achieve all these requirements, which seemingly is a paradox, is one of the major challenges to successful mass customisation. This paper presents an approach to configure the manufacturing system as a collection of minicells, dedicated to producing option families, to which products can be routed depending on the customisation needs of each customer.

Keywords: mass customisation; minicells; cellular manufacturing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMASSC.2007.012812

International Journal of Mass Customisation, 2007 Vol.2 No.1/2, pp.39 - 56

Published online: 16 Mar 2007 *

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