DESIGN FOR AGILE ASSEMBLY - AN OPERATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

The concept of agile manufacturing is driven by the need to quickly re spond to the changing customer requirements. Agile manufacturing deman ds a manufacturing system to be able to produce efficiently a large va riety of products and be reconfigurable to accommodate changes in the product mix and product designs. The manufacturing system reconfigurab ility and product variety are critical in agile manufacturing. The con cept of agility has an impact on design of assemblies. To implement ag ile manufacturing, methodologies of design for agile manufacturing are needed. Design for agile assembly is accomplished by considering oper ational issues of assembly systems at the early product design stage. In this paper, three rules applicable to the design of products for ag ile assembly from an operational perspective are proposed. These rules are intended to support the design of products to meet the requiremen ts of agile manufacturing. Illustrative examples are provided to demon strate the potential of the design rules. Procedures and algorithms fo r implementing these rules are presented.