AST 2013, April 23 - 24, Hamburg, Germany A MODULARIZATION APPROACH FOR AIRCRAFT CABIN COMPONENTS Tammo E. Bahns, Nicolas Gebhardt, Dieter Krause Institute of Product Development and Mechanical Engineering Design, Hamburg University of Technology Denickestraße 17, 21073 Hamburg, Germany tammo.bahns@tuhh.de Abstract The main focus of this paper is to demonstrate the challenges and potentials of modular product family concepts in the field of aircraft cabin interior. For this purpose special challenges in the field of aircraft cabin interior are presented and a development project of an aircraft seat family is shown. The case presented applies the integrated PKT-approach for the Development of Modular Product Families developed at the Institute of Product Development and Mechanical Engineering Design (PKT) at the Hamburg University of Technology and is based on a cooperative project founded by German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. 1 INTRODUCTION The aviation industry is heavily affected by the megatrend individualization. To succeed on global markets, airplane manufacturer and suppliers have to cover the individual demands from their customers [1]. The resulting external variety causes a high internal variety of parts and processes, e.g. development, documentation and certification. Airplane manufacturers as wells as suppliers have to handle this variety in multiple business areas. A focal point is the product development, where not a single product but multiple variants of the product have to be developed [10]. Furthermore by defining the product structure, product development provides the biggest influence on the internal variety. Product development methodology research at the PKT focusses on methodical support for the development of modular product families. Suitable product development methods, like Design for Variety [9] and Life Phase Modularization [4], allow reducing internal variety along the whole supply chain. E.g. they enable other strategies (Figure 1) like postponement or catalogue based configuration management.