A Digital Interface for the Part Designers and the Fixture Designers for a Reconfigurable Assembly System

This paper presents a web-based framework for interfacing product designers and fixture designers to fetch the benefits of early supplier involvement (ESI) to a reconfigurable assembly system (RAS). The interfacing of the two members requires four steps, namely, collaboration chain, fixture supplier selection, knowledge share, and accommodation of service facilities so as to produce multiple products on a single assembly line. The interfacing not only provokes concurrency in the activities of product and fixture designer but also enables the assembly systems to tackle the spatial and generational variety. Among the four stages of interfacing, two steps are characterized by optimization issues, one from the product customer side and the other from the fixture designer side. To impart promptness in the optimization and hence the interaction, computationally economic tools are also presented in the paper for both of the supplier selection and fixture design optimization.