Modelling and analysis of product platforms and assembly sequences with respect to variability

A challenge for highly configurable products is that the manufacturing system has to support all possible variants that can be configured. The production system is often highly automated and the link between the product and the assembly system can be expressed through operations where each operation models how a part in the bill-of-material is assembled to the final product. Typically, operations have precedence constraints that express that certain parts have to be assembled before other parts. However, it is important to make sure that all possible variants can be successfully assembled while satisfying all precedence constraints. In this paper we present fully automated analysis method that is able to analyze the existence of product configurations of that cannot be successfully assembled.