An assembly-oriented product family representation for integrated design

This paper presents a product family representation model which was developed during a research project called CISAL, the purpose of which was to propose an integrated approach for the design of product families and their assembly system. This model is able to deal with partial information from the design of the product family, a situation that often occurs at early stages of the concurrent design of products and production means. The proposed model is assembly-oriented, because the project covered design for assembly, assembly planning, and line layout issues. In fact, it was developed on the basis of the design methodology itself. An originality of the design approach-which impacted the proposed model-is to decompose the product into so-called functional entities defined by the designer. The product family is then seen as an assembly of functional entities that can be analyzed, designed, and further assembled separately. Component variants are aggregated into generic components, and links between components become generic. The paper presents the essential concepts related to this product family representation, before showing their application to an illustrative industrial case study: a family of signaling relays.