# Research on Children's Customized Furniture Design Based on Group Technology
## 1 Introduction  
China is a major timber consuming country. According to statistics, China's annual timber consumption is about 600 million m\({}^{3}\). Although China's timber resources are relatively abundant, timber production only accounts for 15% of the consumption, making China's timber highly dependent on imports. On this basis, the demand for wood and wood products is growing. In order to improve this situation, the development of China's panels has become more diversified by using different materials and use requirements to manufacture different types of panels. Moreover, the question of how to rationalize the use of panels and to improve the utilization rate of panels has gradually become the focus of wood development [1, 2]. Meanwhile, Chinese furniture manufacturing has taken a step from the traditional semi-mechanized and mechanized production mode toward information and digital manufacturing and is gradually advancing toward intelligent manufacturing at a fast pace [3, 4]. Group technology (GT) means that all kinds of products and parts of an enterprise are divided into different groups with specific principles based on processing similarity (shape, size and manufacture process) among products, and the products in the same group can be processed by utilizing the same method basedon the groups (organize production links) so as to improve efficiency and to realize the rationalization of the design, manufacturing and management of products with multi-species and small-batch production [5]. For home furnishing enterprises, group technology is a production technology that uses parts with similar structures, materials and processes to form part families and designs processes specifically for the part families targeted for production, thereby expanding processing batches, reducing part variety and improving labor productivity. Moreover, it is the basis for advanced manufacturing models such as flexible production and mass customization of furniture [6,7]. Nowadays, the children furniture market has gradually become an essential part of the furniture market in China [8]. According to relevant studies on the ergonomics of children, the design has different emphases for different age groups of children [9,10] and should meet both physical and psychological needs [11,12]. There have been many research directions about the design of children furniture since the initial extension of adult furniture such as malleable design, which takes the structure, function and material of the furniture as the innovation point [13] to design a series of functional modules for products with different functions or the same function with various performances and reconstitute new products by selecting and combing modules for modular design [14,15] and multifunctional design [16]. From the perspective of children's emotions, the appearance design of children furniture is more inclined to be interesting and affective [17, 18, 19]. According to different scenarios, there are school children furniture, medical children furniture, household children furniture, etc. [20, 21, 22]. As children's furniture style is variable in shape and size, it requires a more targeted design compared to adult furniture [23,24]. The parts of children furniture are divided into two types: panel and solid wood. Parents prefer safe and environmentally friendly products when choosing furniture [25,26]; hence, solid wood furniture is chosen in most cases [27,28]. Compared with panel parts, solid wood parts have various structural sizes; thus, it is necessary to frequently change the tools of the machine and to increase the confirmation of the first piece and process preparation time in production. In view of these facts, solid wood parts are difficult to standardize in production and has caused a lot of waste of manpower, materials and processing time in the production process [29].