Data Model and Personalized Configuration Systems for Mass Customization – a Two Step Approach for Integrating Technical and Organisational Issues

Mass Customization (MC) is a management concept which aims at the combination of mass production and customer related individualization. Product configuration is mentioned as one of the critical factors in realizing MC projects but it is a summarizing term with different requirements and functions depending on the particular MC scenario. In this paper, an approach is presented integrating the technical and organizational aspects of product configuration for MC. Here, two basic aspects are important: customer cooperation in establishing product models and afterwards supporting customers by personalized configuration processes. For this purpose, we introduce a meta model that allows to specify highly customizable product families restricted by complex dependencies called implications. The novelty of our approach is that the customers are enabled to model the space of products fitting their needs using the same model and method as the supplier side. Based on these models a personalized configurator is automatically generated.