Product family modelling for manufacturing planning

To enable product configuration of a product family, it is important to develop a model of the selected product family. From such model, a product configurator, in which customers can specify individual products from the family, can be developed. To further utilise the product family model for planning and executing production, the model should be enriched with additional data. The idea is that, when any individual product is specified using the product configurator, a product model can be extracted with all data, necessary for manufacturing planning. In this paper, issues of creating manufacturing structures and related planning data in product family models are presented. Primarily, the more complicated multi-level manufacturing structures are considered and it is argued that the models need to specify other structures for manufacturing compared with the product structure resulting from configuration. Furthermore, the addition of attributes for planning data is addressed.