Abstract
Rising logistics costs, mass customization and market-specific product variants are the reason for the current trend towards decentralized and geographically distributed manufacturing systems. Often these mini-factories are organized and managed in production networks. While there exist already many scientifically discussed methods for the design of single manufacturing systems, there are only few works discussing the design of production networks with distributed manufacturing units. This chapter provides an Axiomatic Design based approach for the design, planning and implementation of distributed manufacturing systems using the example of a franchise network with geographically distributed, changeable, scalable as well as replicable manufacturing units. The aim of the proposed approach is to derive a set of appropriate design parameters, which supports practitioners in their work to design the manufacturing system. The presented approach has been successfully applied in a real case study of an Italian franchise company.