Product Family in Concurrent Design

Abstract The aim of the paper is to bring a new point of view on the purposes of the concurrent engineering and to extend them to market pressures for diversity, shorter product life and competition. However, diversity is in contradiction with other current goals as low costs, high productivity and standardization. In this context, a concurrent strategy can contribute to find compromise solutions with product diversity and production effectiveness. In this paper, we discuss the concurrent engineering problem for product families and assembly systems. Different models for products are presented. Web grammars are applied to dynamically capture the progression on the design.