Relating product definition and product variety

As manufacturers adapt to the needs of today's buyers' market, which is replacing the manufacturers' market of yesterday, the need for product variety will increase. Even today, manufacturers of products which are built to customer order, for example, cars, aeroplanes and medical equipment, offer such a large range of combinations of product features that millions of variants of a single products are possible. Commercially available software systems support the automation of many aspects of the engineering process, product databases enable the description of single products and engineering applications can use these product descriptions to carry out their tasks. However, contemporary software systems do not support product variety without a great deal of redundancy. This paper describes the use of advanced product modelling techniques to describe families of products without redundant data. The description of multiple views on a product family, without data redundancy, is a major problem to be overcome when product families are modelled. We show how a single product model can be used to describe a product family and support two typical views, a sales (customer) view and an assembly view, of a variant of that product family without redundancy.