A new philosophy for the design of a product and its assembly line

The main objective of the research presented is to develop a new philosophy for product and assembly line design. Most methodologies usually do not consider the interaction between the two design processes in presence. Moreover, most concurrent engineering approaches do not deal with multi-variant products. A research project was initiated to tackle this problem. The computer tool under development, called CISAL, is applicable to multi-variant products, leading to a unique assembly line for all variants. It is subdivided into three main modules, with possible feedback between them: product analysis, operating modes and assembly techniques, and line layout. We present the framework of this project and the underlying methodology.