• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.69-79
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• 2012

One of the goals of mass customization is to permit changes in the product to meet specific customer requirements without substantially impacting the cost or delivery schedule. In large assembly manufacturing industries, such as shipbuilding and commercial airplane production, customization takes place by changing components and/or modules, sometimes called interim products. Using shipbuilding as a case study, it is possible to study the impact of such changes using mass customization principles on the schedule. In large assembly manufacturing, mass customization changes would cause changes in engineering time and production time, based on the amount of change required by the customization. This work first proposes a structure for implementing mass customization in shipbuilding and then uses simulation of a simplified, theoretical shipbuilding process to evaluate the impacts of various levels of change on delivery performance.