Self-configuring components approach to product variant development

The use of modularity in the design of a new product or the adoption of a product platform, as the base to define new solutions within a product family, offers the company a chance to meet diverse customer needs at low cost due to economies of scale in all the phases of the product’s life-cycle. At present, the concept of modularity in product design is becoming widely used in many industries from automobile to consumer electronics. However, if modularity and "mass customisation" have attracted the interest of industries and researchers, the greatest efforts have been focused on the theoretical aspect, while the related design support technologies have been only partially implemented. In this context, our intent is to develop highly reusable models, able to re-configure themselves on the basis of new functional requirements. The proposed approach is based on the definition of what we call self-configuring component (SCC) and multiple-level function (MLF). To describe the approach, a practical example related to the design of modules for woodworking machines has been reported.