Implementing Mass Customization Using SAP Variant Configuration and a 3D Printer

The process of manufacturing customized products at the efficiency of mass production is called mass customization manufacturing. In order to implement mass customization a product configurator, a well-planned configurable product platform and a flexible manufacturing technology are essential. As 3D printers are becoming more and more popular it is evident that they act as very flexible factories that could manufacture any object. This thesis tries to find out how 3D printers and product configurators could be combined to implement mass customization manufacturing. The system created in this thesis manufactures configurable motorcycles whose configuration model is maintained in SAP-ERP system. A product configurator built using SAP Variant configuration allows the user to configure a variant of the motorcycle according to their needs using the configuration model. This configured variant is manufactured using a 3D printer. Qualitative methods are used to gain knowledge and understanding about mass customization and SAP Variant configuration from books, scientific articles and software development forums. Using this knowledge the system is implemented which could manufacture approximately 23 different types of motorcycles customized by the user. The users who configure and manufacture the motorcycles also get hands-on knowledge about basic business processes in SAP ERP related to production planning (PP) and logistics (LO) modules and understand how information flows in the ERP system with respect to mass customized manufacturing.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

The Configurable SAT Solver Challenge (CSSC)

It is well known that different solution strategies work well for different types of instances of hard combinatorial problems. As a consequence, most solvers for the propositional satisfiability problem (SAT) expose parameters that allow them to be customized to a particular family of instances. In the international SAT competition series, these parameters are ignored: solvers are run using a single default parameter setting (supplied by the authors) for all benchmark instances in a given track. While this competition format rewards solvers with robust default settings, it does not reflect the situation faced by a practitioner who only cares about performance on one particular application and can invest some time into tuning solver parameters for this application. The new Configurable SAT Solver Competition (CSSC) compares solvers in this latter setting, scoring each solver by the performance it achieved after a fully automated configuration step. This article describes the CSSC in more detail, and reports the results obtained in its two instantiations so far, CSSC 2013 and 2014

An extended configurable UML activity diagram and a transformation algorithm for business process reference modeling

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions provide generic off-the-shelf reference models usually known as best practices . The configuration !individualization of the reference model to meet specific requirements of business end users however, is a difficult task. The available modeling languages do not provide a complete configurable language that could be used to model configurable reference models. More specifically, there is no algorithm that monitors the transformation of configurable UML Activity Diagram (AD) models while preserving the syntactic correctness of the model. To fill these gaps we propose an extended UML AD modeling language which we named Configurable UML Activity Diagram (C-UML AD). The C-UML AD is used to represent a reference model while showing all the variation points and corresponding dependencies within the model. The C-UML AD covers the requirements and attributes of a configurable modeling language as prescribed by earlier researchers who developed Configurable EPC (C-EPC). We also propose a complete algorithm that transforms the C-UML AD business model to an individual consistent UML AD business model, where the end user\u27s configuration values are consistent with the constraints of the model. Meanwhile, the syntactic correctness of the transformed model is preserved. We validated the Transformation Algorithm by showing how all the transformation steps of the algorithm preserve the syntactic correctness of any given configurable business model, as prescribed by earlier researchers, and by running it on different sets of test scenarios to demonstrate its correctness. We developed a tool to apply the Transformation Algorithm and to demonstrate its validity on a set of test cases as well as a real case study that was used by earlier researchers who developed the C-EPC

A modular product structure based methodology for seamless information flow in PLM system implementation

Product development process deals with large amount of information generated from market survey, concept design, manufacture, test, limited production, production, service, and obsoleting. The information should be stored systematically so that it is easily traceable and reusable for future product development. This paper presents a methodology for seamless product information flow between the three main enterprise information systems such as Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), Product Data/Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) used in the process of innovative product development while implementing PLM. PLM implementation deals with various existing product data and information generated over years both from CAD and ERP systems. Data integration is very challenging in multi-national engineering companies and has important impact on future decisions while creating new processes. The aim is to define a modular product structure that can be used to connect the product information throughout the life cycle that can be reused effectively and efficiently for future similar products

Product Platform for Automatic Configuration of Modular Strongrooms

Modular strongrooms (MSR) consist of industrially made elements, which are assembled at the place of use. They are designed on individual customer’s requests. The customer chooses the resistance grade according to EN 1143-1 standard and provides dimensions of the available space for requested product to be fit in. Configuration of MSR is realized by combining standard modules which are, for the selected resistance grade, repeated in each new project, and differ only by their number and dimensions. This paper presents product platform developed for automatic MSR configuration, based on parametric and variable design, which provides requested configuration of the product, eliminates possible errors in design process, provides requested product quality level, decreases design and manufacturing costs, shortens design time and provides faster response to customer’s requests. The proposed concept is tested and confirmed on numerous examples of realized projects

Domain-Type-Guided Refinement Selection Based on Sliced Path Prefixes

Abstraction is a successful technique in software verification, and interpolation on infeasible error paths is a successful approach to automatically detect the right level of abstraction in counterexample-guided abstraction refinement. Because the interpolants have a significant influence on the quality of the abstraction, and thus, the effectiveness of the verification, an algorithm for deriving the best possible interpolants is desirable. We present an analysis-independent technique that makes it possible to extract several alternative sequences of interpolants from one given infeasible error path, if there are several reasons for infeasibility in the error path. We take as input the given infeasible error path and apply a slicing technique to obtain a set of error paths that are more abstract than the original error path but still infeasible, each for a different reason. The (more abstract) constraints of the new paths can be passed to a standard interpolation engine, in order to obtain a set of interpolant sequences, one for each new path. The analysis can then choose from this set of interpolant sequences and select the most appropriate, instead of being bound to the single interpolant sequence that the interpolation engine would normally return. For example, we can select based on domain types of variables in the interpolants, prefer to avoid loop counters, or compare with templates for potential loop invariants, and thus control what kind of information occurs in the abstraction of the program. We implemented the new algorithm in the open-source verification framework CPAchecker and show that our proof-technique-independent approach yields a significant improvement of the effectiveness and efficiency of the verification process.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, 4 algorithm