Anyone written a paper/overview covering production control of made-to-order items? The central characteristics being fabrication on demand, and a very wide feature permutation space.
Example: paint. incoming raw materials are 2 or 3 bases and 4 pigments. Given that a customer can call for any pigment amount on a scale of 0-20, that's a total design space of somewhere around 3/4 million possible legal formulas. Pigments and bases have different price points, so formula affects price. There are additional additives (gloss-enhancement, skuff-resistance, glitter, non-skid treatments) that aren't compatible with specific pigments or bases, nor always with each other), so there can be elaborate rules governing whether a formula is valid/manufacturable.
How would you model that?
thanks,
bob