**1. Introduction: product customization**

In recent years, in order to enhance ability of an enterprise to quickly respond to dynamic changes in the market, the concept of product customization has been introduced into industry [1, 2]. Customer requirements cause increased product complexity and shortened product life cycle [3–5]. In made-to-order (MTO) manufacturing enterprises (ME), product architecture is usually modularized, and components are standardized. Product configuration is focused on selecting product modules or components and assembling them according to customer requirements [6]. Reusing certain modules can simplify a new product design and improves ability of an organization to offer greater product variety to the market [2, 7, 8]. The customization level is usually defined during the product design phase, in order to specify which components, parts or modules, known also as a configuration item, can be customized

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

and selected according to customers' expectations [9, 10]. The concept of open-architecture product (OAP) can balance product economy and user requirements and can be applied to functional modules and adaptable interfaces for users to replace or add personalized modules into an original product in order to meet a personalized need [11, 12]. Any customized product is designed based on customer's requirements [13] and has to meet diversified requirements of product users. Product structures and design methods, such as a product configured from modules, are required to meet the need in developing personalized products with a cost-effective solution [12, 14, 15]. Product variant management has the goal to offer as many product variants as possible to the customer but keep the internal variety as low as possible at the same time [16]. Product design requirements should include the characteristics of modularity and reliability, as well as the cycle time and the implementation of production process reconfiguration [15, 17]. The three main goals of each manufacturing systems are cost, product quality, and responsiveness to markets [18].

Reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) is a recently proposed, new class of manufacturing systems [19]. RMS has the ability to update itself, in order to answer dynamic requirements or unpredictable failures [20], and is characterized, among others, by modularity: all major components are modular, and modules are designed with interfaces for component integration [21].
