Abstract
In recent times it has become a consolidated trend on the worlds automotive markets to characterise products within ever more specific categories in order to satisfy the almost individual requirements of the final user.
As fare as possible, Carmakers attempt to follow this trend in the full knowledge that, to do so, production plant must be designed to allow for a very high degree of model differentiation.
Current production systems are, however, still structured for manufacturing with a low degree of flexibility. This means that within each segment differentiation is limited to variants based on common platforms, which is far from the concept of managing a wide range of vehicles in real time.
To efficiently and economically respond to the need for a high level of operational flexibility it is necessary to bring about a profound revision of the vehicle build concept and of the relative production system.
The aim of the "Mega-Module" vehicle concept in this paper is to suggest a step forward in making the product differentiation process more feasible. This can be attained via the "organised" aggregation into production lines of a small number of pre-assembled groups which are already differentiated or can be differentiated on line.