Abstract
The integrity of products over families and generations has become an essential factor toward manufacturing success in today's matured and globalized marketplace. Product architecture governs the deployment of such products by defining diverse characteristics of different products, shared or deviated functional mechanisms, commonalized or specialized manufacturing methods and process, etc. This paper views such product architecture as the chained structures of products under various view points, i.e., customers' needs, function, manufacturing modularity, and their relationships between the various structures, discusses the issues of products modeling toward developing a knowledge management system for product architecture design, and shows the outline of its implementation.
