Engineering Change Management of Product Design Using Model-Based Definition Technology

Abstract

As engineering change (EC) is an inevitable activity in the industry and uses a lot of engineering design resources, the management of EC has become a crucial discipline. In current researches, most of the data related to the product design change are scattered in different forms and the product data are acquired manually from various files in the EC management, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this work, design change-oriented model-based definition (DCMBD) model is defined as the sole data source. Based on the proposed DCMBD model, this work presents a method to acquire the product changes automatically and evaluate design change propagation proactively in a uniform way. The objective of the proposed method is to effectively and efficiently manage ECs. In this paper, first, DCMBD model is defined specifically, which records the product data: geometry, material, tolerance and annotations, relations of product items, lifecycle data, etc. Then, based on the defined DCMBD model, algorithms are presented to automatically acquire two types of product change: parameter change and topology face change. Next, relation models for the product items (parameter and topology face) are demonstrated. After that, the change propagation in terms of parameters and topology faces are clarified. Meanwhile, indices of parameter change influence (PCI) and topology face change influence (TFCI) are presented to evaluate the change impact. Finally, a prototype system for product design change is developed and a case study is demonstrated to show how the proposed method can be applied to the product design change.