Integrating Product and Manufacturing System Platforms - Exploring a Configurable System Approach

Paper in proceeding, 2010

While platform strategies are not the silver bullet to the development of products and manufacturing systems, they might at least yield some benefits. This paper explores a specific platform approach looking at products and manufacturing units as configurable systems. It reports an explorative empirical study identifying issues in integrated development. These issues are matched with the capability of the chosen approach to help solving them. Expressing information on appropriate levels of abstraction and illustrating interconnections of the systems are concluded to be two of the benefits.