ABSTRACT
Along with the growing process of economic globalization, the market is becoming
increasingly competitive. In order to strive for greater market share, enterprises must
meet the individual needs of customers. Based on this background, mass customization
has become the preferred mode of production for the majority of companies. Mass
customization is to solve the contradictory between individual needs and economies of
scale: large-scale production enables enterprises to receive low-cost output, while
customization can improve customers’ satisfaction. The key to coordinate this
contradiction is to secure a reasonable balance between large scale and the individual,
that is, an effective position of customer order decoupling point (Customer Order
Decoupling Point, CODP).
As a graphic and mathematical modeling and analysis tool of the discrete system,
Colored Petri Nets (Colored Petri Nets, CPN) ,which gives the concept of "color" and
"level" to Petri nets, avoid effectively the problem of the growing size of the network
when the complexity of actual system becomes increasing. For the mass customization
system consisting of multiple CODP, which involves many factors and covers the
breadth of content, the difficulty of modeling it is obvious. At the same time, the
uncertainty and dynamics of CODP’s position also cause many difficulties for the
evaluation of system performance. However, colored Petri nets is able to fully express
the characteristics of the system by using color sets, the concept of sub-level. In
addition, the dynamic simulation and mathematical function of expression provides
precisely the key for the positioning of CODP.
A customized product is often made of a number of components and modules. All
of these constitute the BOM (Bill of Material) structure of mass customization product.
There are multiple customer order decoupling points in the BOM structure. In this paper,
author mainly focuses on the mass customization production system. The main job
includes the description of CPN model for mass customization production system, the
analysis of CPN Tools and the decision-making of CODP positioning. All of these can
be specifically summarized as follows:
First, from the perspective of the product’s BOM table, the author studies the mass
customization. The business processes of mass customization including multiple
CODPs and multi-CODPs positioning mathematical model are given.