A framework of virtual design for product customization

One major challenge of mass customization is how to meet two seemingly conflicting goals, namely satisfying individual customers' needs while keeping mass production efficiency. In order to help customers to select the appropriate product family so that the closest variant can be quickly generated and delivered, this paper proposes a virtual design approach by developing virtual prototypes to represent the product platform. With virtual prototypes, assessments of constant delivery can be made to facilitate the selection and negotiation process between sales and customers, thus enabling better informed customization design. The primary goal of virtual design for mass customization is to provide a multidisciplinary design definition at the product family level, and the closest product variant can be rapidly generated. Furthermore, a scenario based simulation environment for design trade-off can be done in an integrated framework. Such a design environment facilitates capturing customer needs and appropriately informing them of the capability of the firm. Ultimately, through virtual design, customers can directly interact with the CAD systems to make trade-offs among factors that are important to them. These factors can be performance, aesthetics, value, cost, urgency, and others. This paper discusses the technical issues that need to be addressed in realizing virtual design and an example is presented to illustrate the proposed approach.