S-MC-S at the APMS 2012

The APMS 2012 international conference was held in Rhodes, Greece 24-26 September. The conference attracted more than 250 delegates from different countries all over the globe exchanging their insights about advances in production management systems. Apart from the parallel sessions of conference, there were 11 special sessions to provide the opportunity for experts to focus more on specific topics and research areas.

Two special sessions were dedicated to Mass Customization, as proposed by Politecnico di Milano. It was the first time in the history of the conference that Mass Customization received this much attention. The two special sessions were titled “Design for Mass Customized products and services” and “Manufacturing and supply chain in a Mass Customization environment”.

From the many submitted papers, 7 papers were allocated to either one if the MC special session. These papers covered a wide range of topics in the field of Mass Customization, such as configurators, process design, modularity, production system modeling, business model, simulation based design, etc.

The MC special sessions at the APMS 2012 presented itself as a meeting point for academia and industry. Apart from presentations from reputable institutes (e.g. RWTH, ETH, Polimi, University of Washington, SINTEF, and SUPSI), there were interesting presentations from Siemens and TXT e-solutions addressing application of mass customization in industry.

In general, conference was a successful event for Mass Customization, not only from scientific point of view but also from networking point of view. The conference evolved into a happy ending as the Burbidge award for best APMS 2012 paper went to one of the papers presented during the MC special session “Manufacturing and supply chain in a Mass customization environment”. We congratulate Prof. Dimitris Mourtzis and his co-authors with this award for their paper ”Simulation-based design of production networks for manufacturing of personalized products”