A Tree Unification Approach to Constructing Generic Processes

Publication Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

8-2009

Abstract

In dealing with product diversity, manufacturing companies strive to maintain stable production by eliminating variations in production processes. In this respect, planning process families in relation to product families to achieve production stability is a promising approach. In this paper, the generic processes underlying process families and their construction is studied. Such generic processes entail well-structured mechanisms that can help companies develop similar processes to fulfill a diversity of customized products. In view of the fact that a production process is commonly represented by a tree, in particular, a binary tree, an approach based on tree unification to construct generic processes from large volumes of existing production data is proposed. This approach is tested using an industrial example involving electronic products, and the derived generic processes have been verified by the users.

Keywords

Process family, generic process, tree unification, product family

Discipline

Operations and Supply Chain Management

Research Areas

Operations Management

Publication

IIE Transactions

Volume

41

Issue

10

First Page

916

Last Page

929

ISSN

0740-817X

Identifier

10.1080/07408170903026049

Publisher

IIE

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1080/07408170903026049

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