Title: Trends in agility for rapid product development and manufacturing – a review

Authors: Spencer Onuh, Ivan Popov, Nick Bennett

Addresses: Regional Centre for Manufacturing Industry (RCMI), Department of Mechanical and Design Engineering, University of Portsmouth, Anglesea Road, Anglesea Building, Portsmouth PO1 3DJ, UK. ' Regional Centre for Manufacturing Industry (RCMI), Department of Mechanical and Design Engineering, University of Portsmouth, Anglesea Road, Anglesea Building, Portsmouth PO1 3DJ, UK. ' Regional Centre for Manufacturing Industry (RCMI), Department of Mechanical and Design Engineering, University of Portsmouth, Anglesea Road, Anglesea Building, Portsmouth PO1 3DJ, UK

Abstract: With the rapid changes taking place in the global market, it has become clear that enterprises working on rapid manufacturing need to integrate Agile Manufacturing (AM) concept with their systems. Rapid Prototyping (RP), tooling and manufacture have come to stay as enablers of agility. Another emerging manufacturing philosophy is Mass Customisation, which is expected to become a market leader in manufacturing in the 21st century. To design efficient production systems and factories operating in these manufacturing paradigms, new design approaches need to be developed. This paper reviews some of the important research work done on RP, Rapid Manufacturing (RM) and AM, to show how RP/RM has been used successfully for implementing agility in a number of research fields.

Keywords: agile manufacturing; AM; mass customisation; MC; rapid manufacturing; RM; rapid prototyping; RP; product development; agility; agile systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2007.015784

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2007 Vol.2 No.2, pp.135 - 146

Published online: 15 Nov 2007 *

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