Abstract
To survive in today's volatile market, companies are striving to deliver greater quality, more customization and innovative designs by offering user customizable products. Mass customization features products that can be altered or changed by the customer to fit his/her needs. In order to incorporate customer specifications, it is necessary to integrate the customer into the design process. Design tools and methodologies need to be altered to accommodate the customer into the process of designing customized products. This paper presents a web based framework to provide customizable products in real time by integrating the customer into the design process. The approach is based on templates to generate automatically Computer Aided Design (CAD) models from customer specifications. Structural feasibility of the user specified products are then evaluated using automated Finite Element Analysis (FEA), optimized and communicated back to the user in real time. The CAD and FEA product family template generalizes the rules and guidelines for entire product family. The template, optimization formulations, and the framework is implemented using commercial software. The applicability of the system is illustrated for web based customization of bicycle frames.