Establishing rules to design a minicell-based manufacturing system for mass customisation

Mass Customisation (MC) is the production of individually customised offerings at low cost and short lead times. Successful MC requires a complete shift in the paradigm from the design-make-sell philosophy used in traditional manufacturing to one that is based on design-sell-make. Flexibility in the manufacturing system is therefore essential to receive orders from customers and fabricate and assemble products as necessary. A minicell-based manufacturing system, which is a modular, networked configuration, is one approach to achieve this flexibility. Due to the various methods available to design the modular minicell configuration, establishing good designs is a complex and time-consuming process. This paper focuses on establishing design rules that can help identify good minicell configurations, to achieve different performance criteria, without having to explore the entire solution space.