Enterprises all over the world focus on the development of products adapted to the customer's demands in less time and with tight resources available in order to be competitive on the market. In the same time, enterprises confront the challenge of offering a wider range of product variants on the market but with less difference (in design, production, maintenance, etc.) between the variants. Therefore, the configuration of products from the previously defined modules is seen as a method of developing product variants. The subject of this thesis is the development of the configuration system for modular products. This paper deals with the following issues: product family, product platform and product architecture. The modular product architecture is being discussed into more details. Additionally, the fields comprised into the configuration process are referred to as follows: configurable product, configurable system, configuration knowledge and customer requirements. A concise outline of existing design theories underlying this research is given, too. Also presented herewith is the methodology "Modular Function Deployment". The main aim of this research is to propose an information model for configuration of modular products upon the customer's requirements. The proposed information model is developed in accordance with the semantics of the product modeling standard ISO 10303 (STEP) and is realized by using the application protocol ISO 10303-214. The basic model structures of the information model are the following: requirement model, product class model, association model, property model, instance model and structure model. The realization of a computer-aided support is based on the proposed information model and tested on a real example of three-phase high-voltage slip-ring induction motors.
2003
MSc thesis
