Concurrent design of flexible assembly systems

Concurrent engineering involves the integration of product and process design to reduce time-to-market and improve design quality. This integration permits to face the problems of causal interdependence in designing products and corresponding production processes. In this paper, an integrated approach for the design of families of assembled products and flexible assembly systems is discussed. The design development is considered as a hierarchical progression process and it is modelled by using web grammars. Along with design criteria of assembly complexity minimization, we propose to consider the criterion of the required flexibility minimization. This criterion leads to the standardization of products and process with consequent savings on investments and costs, and gains in productivity.