Managing product variability by virtual products

Abstract

A new paradigm for customer-oriented production is presented. A complete specification of a product variant is described as a virtual product, a bill of material represented as a data object. This object may be used as a basis for production management. A tool for creating, modifying and processing virtual products is presented, based on a generic product structure. This tool may act as a means to facilitate handling of individual customer-specified products in a serialoriented production environment.