Design of products for an agile manufacturing environment

Many manufacturing companies have been striving to reduce setup times in order to produce smaller lot sizes and to obtain quicker responses to frequently changing market demands. This paper focuses on the reduction of setup time by design improvements of products. Based on the basic principles of setups and concepts from concurrent engineering, rules for design of products at the feature level are presented. Examples and computational results illustrate that the inter-lot setups and in-lot setups can be reduced by the feature-based design rules. The proposed approach for setup reduction appears to be more cost effective than optimizing the processes and operations where the product designs have been fixed. This research intends to bridge the gap between engineering design and manufacturing.