Product line development with customer interaction

While customizing their products, manufacturers attempt to ful ll speci c requirements of the customers within the constraints dictated by the manufacturing (design, planning and production) environment, and by the economical necessity of earning pro t. This paper o ers a generic framework that captures more technical features of this problem than the marketing models: in addition to customer welfare and pro t maximization considerations, engineering aspects are made operational, too. Driven by the interaction between customer preferences and the reallocation of manufacturing resources, viable product families emerge from a variety of technically feasible product alternatives.