Knowledge-Based Adaptable Design of Customer-Orientated Industrial Products
Résumé
This research investigated how companies should react to answer customers' demand of industrial products in a very competitive market. The paper aims at presenting the adaptable design approach that has been developed in the knowledge-based design process and implemented in the company to design products meeting customer's requirements adaptively to referred products optimized for their manufacturability. In the case of production machines, customers' needs are very different due to their own organization of the production lines and stock areas on one hand, the building itself and the culture of the company on the other hand. The system, so-called i-FCB, reconfigures previous relevant design to customer-adapted products. Based on case-based reasoning AI principles, it was developed and implemented in a Thai company; it has been adopted by the design engineers and has been in use daily for more than a year. A new professional version is being developed.