Application of Module Drivers Creating Modular Manufacturing Equipment Enabling Changeability

AbstractThe changeability of manufacturing systems can be of great importance for manufacturing companies to react rapidly and cost-effectively to market and product changes. Creating the basis for increasing the reuse and reusability of the manufacturing system then becomes critical since such capabilities would minimize the cost and/or investments that traditionally follows NPI projects and/or generally handling product variety. To accomplish the changeability of a manufacturing system one important enabler is modularity, which facilitates reusability. The basic concepts of modularity and platform architectures applied in product development can often be directly transferred to a production context though it does not necessarily imply that methods introduced as generic product modularization methods can be adopted directly with the purpose of developing modularized manufacturing systems. However, this paper adopts a method from product development literature to identify the optimal modular structure. Thus, this paper provides a methodology to apply module drivers in the design of modular manufacturing equipment, demonstrated on an industrial example