Process platform representation based on Unified Modelling Language (original) (raw)

Today's manufacturing companies have strived to develop a large variety of customer-specified products in an effort to survive and stay competitive. Process platforms have been well recognized as a means for companies to obtain a stable production and thus the economy of scale. A process platform assists companies in configuring similar production processes for producing families of customized products at low costs through managing product and process variety coherently. Within a process platform, all data related to the product and process families are unified as a common generic structure. To shed light on the various constituent elements and complex relationships inherent in a process platform, this paper emphasizes the structural representation of a process platform. A formalism of process platform representation is developed based on the Unified Modelling Language. It consists of a generic product structure, a generic process structure and an integrated generic routing structure. Also reported is a case study of vibration motors for hand phones.