Managing Changes in Product Configurations

Abstract

In modern engineering environment all information about product is stored in the PDM (Product Data Management) system. These systems allow enumerated configurations of product by using mechanisms of BOM or versioning. However problems arise when product has a large number of configurations that are updated frequently. This is common situation in market of consumer goods. In the present paper this issue is addressed by extending an engineering configuration concept. An initial idea of engineering configurator is to have a product defined by generic BOM with all possible components. The BOM also includes a set of constrains, that define valid combinations of components. However it is difficult to maintain such generic BOM. This paper proposes an idea of BOM decomposition into simple and manageable units belonging to single product space. Decomposition is also performed in the domain of constrains. Configuration problem is split into independent sub-problems, which could be delegated to different engineers to work on, or to do maintenance. The resultant structure is easy to comprehend for engineer, because it follows a natural way of thinking during product design. Therefore, changes in configurations could be done much faster, less time is spend for verifications.