A great challenge facing industry today is managing variety throughout the entire products life cycle. Drivers of products variety, its benefits, pre-requisites and associated complexity and cost are presented. Enhancing consumers’ value through variety and approaches for achieving it efficiently including modularity, commonality and differentiation are discussed. Variant-oriented manufacturing systems paradigms, as enablers of product variety, and the effective co-development of variants and their manufacturing systems to ensure economic sustainability are reviewed. Industrial applications and guidelines to achieve economy of scope with advantages of economy of scale are discussed. Perspectives and insights on future research in this field are offered.

Product Variety Management

In many applications involving make-to-order or time-sensitive (e.g., perishable, seasonal) products, finished orders are often delivered to customers immediately or shortly after the production. Consequently, there is little or no finished product inventory in the supply chain such that production and outbound distribution are very intimately linked and must be scheduled jointly to achieve a desired on-time delivery performance at minimum total cost. Research on integrated scheduling models of production and outbound distribution is relatively recent but is growing very rapidly. In this paper, we provide a survey of such existing models. We present a unified model representation scheme, classify existing models into several different classes, and for each class of the models give an overview of the optimality properties, computational tractability, and solution algorithms for the various problems studied in the literature. We clarify the tractability of some open problems left in the literature and some new problems by providing intractability proofs or polynomial-time exact algorithms. We also identify several problem areas and issues for future research.

Integrated Production and Outbound Distribution Scheduling: Review and Extensions

This paper provides a detailed review of the state of the art in product cost estimation covering various techniques and methodologies developed over the years. The overall work is categorized into qualitative and quantitative techniques. The qualitative techniques are further subdivided into intuitive and analogical techniques, and the quantitative ones into parametric and analytical techniques. Each of the techniques is then described and discussed, in detail, with further subdivisions. The paper also signifies the importance of cost estimation in the early phases of the design cycle and, as such, briefly discusses the current trends and future directions in the area. Research work carried out in the field with reference to specific applications is also reviewed. The paper provides a comprehensive literature review in the field and should be useful to researchers and practitioners interested in this field.

Product Cost Estimation: Technique Classification and Methodology Review

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) algorithm has attracted a great deal of interest among researches and practitioners in a wide variety of fields. The SOM has been analyzed extensively, a number of variants have been developed and, perhaps most notably, it has been applied extensively within fields ranging from engineering sciences to medicine, biology, and economics. We have collected a comprehensive list of 5384 scientific papers that use the algorithms, have benefited from them, or contain analyses of them. The list is intended to serve as a source for literature surveys. The present addendum contains 2092 new articles, mainly from the years 1998-2002. We have provided a keyword index to help finding articles of interest, and additionally a modern automatically constructed variant of a thematic index: a WEBSOM interface to the whole article collection of years 1981-2000. The SOM of SOMs is available at http://websom.hut.fi/websom/somref/search.cgi for browsing and searching the collection.

Bibliography of Self-Organizing Map SOM) Papers: 1998-2001 Addendum

A literature review on the vehicle routing problem with multiple depots

In this paper a well known tool for relative efficiency assessment, namely Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), is used to measure the performance of the nations participating at the last five Summer Olympic games. The proposed approach considers two inputs (GNP and population) and three outputs (number of gold, silver and bronze medals won). To increase the consistency of the results, weight restrictions are included, guaranteeing a higher valuation for gold medals than for silver medals and higher for the latter than for bronze medals. Variable returns to scale are assumed. The results for the last five Summer Olympics are analysed. For each of them, a performance index as well as benchmarks are computed for each country. In addition, plotting the performance of a specific country for the different games can help identify trends as well as objective successes and disappointments.

https://rd.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jors.2601327.pdf

Measuring the performance of nations at the Summer Olympics using data envelopment analysis

Multi-objective Vehicle Routing Problem with Cost and Emission Functions☆

Machine cell formation in generalized group technology

Cellular manufacturing consists of grouping similar machines in cells and dedicating each of them to process a family of similar part types. In this paper, grouping parts into families and machines into cells is done in two steps: first, part families are formed and then machines are assigned. In phase one, weighted similarity coefficients are computed and parts are clustered using a new self-organizing neural network. In phase two, a linear network flow model is used to assign machines to families. To test the proposed approach, different problems from the literature have been solved. As benchmarks we have used a Maximum Spanning Tree heuristic.

Manufacturing cell formation using a new self-organizing neural network

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) are designed to integrate the flexibility of job shops and the efficiency of mass production systems. Product costing methods have to adapt to this new technological environment. On one hand, the high production overhead cost of these systems requires a special attention to overhead allocation. On the other hand, the constantly changing setup configuration and production plans require a constant recalculation of overhead allocation and an a priori estimation of the expected production cost. This paper introduces the concept of flexible costing in FMSs, and proposes a method that modifies the overhead allocation based on the results of the production plan and on the simulated performance of the process. This approach is illustrated with some numerical examples.

Fernando Guerrero

Papers

Measuring the performance of nations at the Summer Olympics using data envelopment analysis

Multi-objective Vehicle Routing Problem with Cost and Emission Functions☆

Machine cell formation in generalized group technology

Manufacturing cell formation using a new self-organizing neural network

A flexible costing system for flexible manufacturing systems using activity based costing