Design of a product configuration system by the object-oriented approach

Mass customization can be approached from many points of view. When the focus is centered on the order acquisition and on the fulfillment process, the recourse to a computer support system, called Product Configurator, is widely adopted. To use it as a support to the design and the development of new products is a challenging application, seldom implemented in current industrial systems. Here, concepts taken from object programming are applied: namely the hereditariness of the class attributes by the children classes. The aim is to implement a hierarchic approach to the customization of the product with the advantage of a thorough applicability of postponed operations along the entire supply chain. In the work the conceptual framework and the application issues of the hierarchic Product Configurator are detailed. In order to evaluate the advantages (simplicity, flexibility and quickness) and the drawbacks (explosion of varieties and difficult stock minimization) of this methodology, it has been applied to case studies taken from production.