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To cope with the intense global competition that is characterized by high product variety and short life cycles, manufacturers need to share manufacturing systems across products and product generations. Co-evolution of product families and assembly systems is proposed as a novel methodology for the joint design and reconfiguration of product families and assembly systems over several product generations. The co-evolution methodology capitalizes on the opportunities for design and assembly system reuse that are offered by modular product architectures and reconfigurable assembly systems. As a result, co-evolution can lead to reduced product development costs and increased responsiveness to market changes.

This paper reviews the state-of-the-art research related to the dimensional accuracy in additive manufacturing (AM) processes. It is considered that the improvement of dimensional accuracy is one of the major scientific challenges to enhance the qualities of the products by AM. This paper analyzed the studies for commonly used AM techniques with respect to dimensional accuracy. These studies are classified by process characteristics, and relevant accuracy issues are examined. The accuracies of commercial AM machines are also listed. This paper also discusses suggestions for accuracy improvement. With the increase of the dimensional accuracy, not only the application of AM processes will diversify but also their value will increase.