Developing products for changeable learning factories

Experiential teaching and research facilities such as learning factories provide a favorable environment and tools to develop, test and implement new products and manufacturing systems concepts and solutions. Learning factories that are geared towards the capabilities and requirements of changeable manufacturing systems (CMS) are used for validating new products, their variants and changeable production systems design, planning and control methods. Existing approaches of developing new products are reviewed, and a new approach to develop products for changeable learning factories is presented and validated by a case study. The new development approach is dedicated to changeable learning manufacturing systems by choosing a product line among many candidates to suite the learning system capabilities and desired learning outcomes. Designs for product variants that suite the learning factory and planned learning scenarios and training experience. This paper focuses on learning factories for changeable manufacturing systems, which are constructed to possess the necessary changeability enablers such as mobility, modularity, scalability, universality and compatibility. It is challenging to associate learning and research to a changeable manufacturing system.