Trends in agility for rapid product development and manufacturing – a review

With the rapid changes taking place in the global market, it has become clear that enterprises working on rapid manufacturing need to integrate Agile Manufacturing (AM) concept with their systems. Rapid Prototyping (RP), tooling and manufacture have come to stay as enablers of agility. Another emerging manufacturing philosophy is Mass Customisation, which is expected to become a market leader in manufacturing in the 21st century. To design efficient production systems and factories operating in these manufacturing paradigms, new design approaches need to be developed. This paper reviews some of the important research work done on RP, Rapid Manufacturing (RM) and AM, to show how RP/RM has been used successfully for implementing agility in a number of research fields.