Joining element design and product variety in manufacturing industries

Product variety is a growing trend of offering highly configurable products at the cost of inducing complexity in manufacturing. Joining is a key manufacturing process and historically was a paper-based process with incomplete variety documentation. Nowadays, digital joining element design is a substitution of paper for 3D space. Nonetheless, it remains an ambiguous manual task with limited automation, resulting in time-consuming iterative error-prone development trajectories and costly reworks. This contribution addresses the state of the art in joining element design in both research and industry practice. It reviews product variety and its impact on joining processes. The paper identifies a need for integrating product variety into joining element design and it proposes a solution pathway using artificial intelligence methods.